By IDN Science Desk
Huge Reservoir of Water Found Far Away
Courtesy IDN-InDepth NewsReport
BERLIN (IDN) - "From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other," said Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
But two teams of astronomers who made a sensational discovery, by way of spotting "the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe", could not leave it at pointing to a sheer possibility.
While the significance of this discovery for planet Earth is not yet known, water is vital for all known forms of life. It covers nearly 71% of the Earth's surface. The 'water vapour', researchers have discovered, is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's oceans, reports NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). It surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth. A light-year is about six trillion miles.
The astronomers had expected water vapour to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before, NASA stated in a news release, adding: "There's water vapour in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way's water is frozen in ice."
Quasar is an acronym for 'quasi-stellar radio source', a very energetic and distant active galactic nucleus. Quasars are said to be extremely luminous and were first identified as being high redshift sources of electromagnetic energy, including radio waves and visible light, that were point-like, similar to stars, rather than extended sources similar to galaxies.
"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," NASA quotes Matt Bradford, a scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times," the scientist adds.
Bradford led one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbours a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns, a NASA news release on July 22, 2011 stated.
Water vapour is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapour is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size.
According to scientists, the presence of water vapour indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere, it's still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what is typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.
According to NASA, measurements of the water vapour and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. Whether this will happen is not clear, the astronomers say, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or might be ejected from the quasar.
Bradford's team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California, reports the NASA release.
The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, Lis's team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford's team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water, states the NASA release.
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