"To me, the most exciting aspect of this discovery is that it demonstrates how pervasive water is even at a tenth the current age of the universe," Murphy said. (Related: "Immaculate Black Holes Found Near Universe's Conception.") Perhaps even more surprising is that the colossal cosmic reservoir formed when the universe was a mere 1.6 billion years old. In fact, there's enough gas and dust present that the black hole could grow to be 6 times its current size-or more than 120 billion times the mass of our sun, Murphy said. The team also revealed that the unusually warm water cloud is bathing other gases and dust around the black hole. Murphy and colleagues found the wet black hole using a spectrograph attached to the ten-meter Caltech Submillimeter Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. (Also see "Star Found Shooting Water 'Bullets.'") The vapor around this particular quasar represents enough water "to fill all the oceans on the Earth over 140 trillion times-that's a lot of water." "As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the observed water vapor," said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist swaddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar.Īmong the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are gravitationally consuming surrounding disks of material while burping back out powerful energy jets. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).In a galaxy 12 billion light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say. Rees, Gravity’s Fatal Attraction, 2nd ed. A popular account closely related to the subject of this essay is Mitchell Begelman and Martin J. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov, Introduction to Black Hole Physics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). Monographs on black holes include Subrahman yan Chandrasekhar, The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Valeri P. Wald, General Relativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Hartle, Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity (San Francisco: Addison-Wesley, 2003) Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry (San Francisco: Addison-Wesley, 2004) and Robert M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) James B.
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