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发帖数: 19049 | 1 Researchers have found the largest body of water anywhere in the universe,
to date, with mass that measures several trillion times the mass of water on
the entire planet Earth.
The reservoir is gigantic, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in
the Earth's oceans, residing 10 billion light years away.
"Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early
universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise," the Carnegie
Institution, one of the groups behind the findings, said.
The water cloud was found to be in the central regions of a faraway quasar.
"Quasars contain massive black holes that steadily consuming a surrounding
disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out amounts of energy,"
the Institution said in its statement.
The quasar is one of the most powerful entities in the universe, with this
particular one pumping out 1,000 trillion times more energy than our sun,
and 65,000 times the whole of the Milky Way.
The quasar where the gigantic water reservoir is located is some 12 billion
years old, only 1.6 billion years younger than the Big Bang. It is older
than the formation most of the stars in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy.
Because of the sheer distance from Earth, light from the event takes so long
to reach researchers instruments that the data actually represents a
snapshot into the past. It gives researchers a glimpse not only of
interstellar phenomenon, but also the beginnings of the universe.
"These findings are very exciting," said Jason Glenn, a study co-author, and
a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor, in a statement.
The discovery was part of a larger study of the quasar named APM 08279+5255,
where the black hole is 20 billion times greater than the sun. There
researched found water vapor around the black hole extending hundreds of
light-years in size.
Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant
universe, but had not detected it this far away before.
There's water vapor 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.
"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing
this huge mass of water. It's another demonstration that water is pervasive
throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.," said NASA
scientist Matt Bradford.
Research on the discovery is slated to be published in a coming issue of
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
NASA 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
Astronomers and scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the
California Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, the
University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Institute
for Space and Astronautical Science in Japan were involved.
The research team was comprised of a wide array of international talent. The
Carnegie Institution's Eric Murphy headed up the study.
Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA,
the Research Corporation and the partner institutions. |
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