{"id":13073,"date":"2024-07-05T20:05:16","date_gmt":"2024-07-05T20:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=13073"},"modified":"2024-07-05T20:05:16","modified_gmt":"2024-07-05T20:05:16","slug":"12-billion-year-old-body-of-water-discovered-floating-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=13073","title":{"rendered":"12-billion-year-old body of water discovered floating in space"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took three years and two teams of astronomers to find the largest reservoir of water ever detected<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n

It took three years and two teams of astronomers, but scientists managed to uncover the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As if that wasn\u2019t impressive enough, the huge body of water was determined to be approximately 12-billion-years-old.<\/p>\n

The discovery was with the assistance of a team led by Matt Bradford, a scientist at\u00a0NASA\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,\u00a0California<\/a>, who began their observations in 2008.<\/p>\n

Bradford\u2019s team relied on a 33-foot\u00a0telescope<\/a>\u00a0near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to make their initial observations, before following up with observations from an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.<\/p>\n

The second team of\u00a0astronomers<\/a>, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in\u00a0physics<\/a> at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find the water.<\/p>\n

\n
\"The<\/div>\n

The water is much larger than anything on Earth. (NASA\/ESA)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And this is no little puddle we\u2019re talking about. In fact, it\u2019s the equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the\u00a0world\u2019s ocean<\/a>. So, it\u2019s safe to say it\u2019s pretty large.<\/p>\n

Sitting more than 12 billion light-years away, the water surrounds a huge, feeding black hole known as a quasar. Quasars are considered massive celestial objects and emit large amounts of energy.<\/p>\n

Bradford noted the environment around the quasar is \u2018very unique\u2019 in the way it\u2019s producing the \u2018huge mass of water\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,\u201d he said in a press release about the discovery in 2011.<\/p>\n

Prior to the discovery of the huge mass of water, astronomers had never found water vapor present this far back in the early universe. There is water elsewhere in the Milky Way, but most of it is frozen in ice.<\/p>\n

\n
\"The<\/div>\n

The discovery of water marked a first for astronomers. (Getty Stock Photo)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By finding water around the quasar, scientists were able to determine that the quasar is effectively \u2018bathing\u2019 the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is \u2018unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards\u2019, according to a\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0from Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it\u2019s still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what\u2019s typical in galaxies like the Milky Way,\u201d the release explains.<\/p>\n

Astronomers are still hoping to learn more about the distant universe through future research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took three years and two teams of astronomers to find the largest reservoir of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"views":144,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}