Astronomers discover the largest and most distant reservoir of water yet
Baku, July 24 (AZERTAC). Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar, one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos, the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that`s at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world`s oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.
Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth. The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old. The environment around this quasar is unique in that it`s producing this huge mass of water, says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech. It`s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times. Bradford leads one of two international teams of astronomers that have described their quasar findings in separate papers that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Bradford`s team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called Z-Spec at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO), a 10-meter telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Z-Spec is an extremely sensitive spectrograph, requiring temperatures cooled to within 0.06 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the CSO, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, Lis`s team was looking for traces of hydrogen fluoride in the spectrum of APM 08279+5255, but serendipitously detected a signal in the quasar`s spectrum that indicated the presence of water. The signal was at a frequency corresponding to radiation that is emitted when water transitions from a higher energy state to a lower one. While Lis`s team found just one signal at a single frequency, the wide bandwidth of Z-Spec enabled Bradford and his colleagues to discover water emission at many frequencies. These multiple water transitions allowed Bradford`s team to determine the physical characteristics of the quasar`s gas and the water`s mass.
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