Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water



This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor.



Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's

A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
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.

Water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size (a light-year is about six trillion miles). Its presence 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's typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.

Measurements of the water vapor 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.
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.
Other authors on the Bradford paper, "The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255," include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena.

Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions.

  

ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times." Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research

is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Landing Convoy Ready on the Runway

Long before sonic booms rock Florida's Space Coast and a space shuttle glides to a stop, about 25 unique vehicles and their operators -- collectively called the landing convoy -- snake their way toward the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Each one has a specific duty to make the shuttle safe to enter, assist the flight crew out and prepare the spacecraft for towing to a nearby processing hangar.

 

"When they say, 'We're definitely landing here, let's go,' it's neat to see everybody get in their vehicles and go out and support it," said Richard Merritt, a landing support manager with United Space Alliance. "It's a rather big group of people."
The nucleus of the operation is based in the Convoy Command Vehicle -- a 40-foot-long modified motor home with state-of-the-art video cameras and recorders, television monitors and a giant communications satellite antenna. It's also outfitted with a weather system to monitor the temperature, and wind speed and direction on the runway.

"It's basically like a mini firing room in there," Merritt said.

Inside the heart of the whole operation is the convoy commander, who stays in constant communication with the shuttle and all of the vehicles during post-landing activities. Immediately after wheelstop, he or she sends NASA Fire Rescue trucks out toward the shuttle. They remain a safe distance, though -- about 1,250 feet -- until safety sniff checks determine there are no hazardous gases radiating off the shuttle. Meanwhile, emergency helicopters are hovering nearby, just in case they are needed.

It's a dangerous job: heat sparks or flames could result in fire, fuel could cause permanent damage to skin, eyes or respiratory systems, and the main landing gear tires are so hot and full of pressure, they could rupture. To keep about 150 workers safe, they put on air-tight protective gear called self-contained atmospheric protective ensembles, or SCAPE suits. They also go through extensive training to pull off the extremely choreographed operation.

Once the shuttle is deemed safe, two convoys deploy on the runway -- a forward and an aft. The forward heads toward the nose of the shuttle with vehicles and personnel that remove time-sensitive payloads and experiments. Astronaut support personnel, called ASPs, also usher the flight crew members out of the shuttle, through the White Room truck and into their Crew Transport Vehicle where they undergo standard medical checks.

Recent News On Nasa

Eye of Gaia: billion-pixel camera to map Milky Way

The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting “billion-pixel array” will serve as the super-sensitive ‘eye’ of ESA’s Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission.

While the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a clear night, Gaia will map a billion stars within our own Milky Way Galaxy and its neighbors over the course of its five-year mission from 2013, charting their brightness and spectral characteristics along with their three-dimensional positions and motions.

In order to detect distant stars up to a million times fainter than the eye can see, Gaia will carry 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs), advanced versions of chips within standard digital cameras.
Developed for the mission by e2v Technologies of Chelmsford, UK, these rectangular detectors are a little smaller than a credit card, each one measuring 4.7x6 cm but thinner than a human hair.
The 0.5x1.0 m mosaic has been assembled at the Toulouse facility of Gaia prime contractor Astrium France.  
Technicians spent much of May carefully fitting together each CCD package on the support structure, leaving only a 1 mm gap between them. Working in double shifts in strict cleanroom conditions, they added an average four CCDs per day, finally completing their task on 1 June.
“The mounting and precise alignment of the 106 CCDs is a key step in the assembly of the flight model focal plane assembly,” said Philippe Garé, ESA’s Gaia payload manager.

The completed mosaic is arranged in seven rows of CCDs. The main array comprises 102 detectors dedicated to star detection. Four others check the image quality of each telescope and the stability of the 106.5º angle between the two telescopes that Gaia uses to obtain stereo views of stars.
In order to increase the sensitivity of its detectors, the spacecraft will maintain their temperature of –110ºC.

Gaia’s CCD support structure, like much of the rest of the spacecraft, is made of silicon carbide – a ceramic like material, extraordinarily resistant to deforming under temperature changes.
 
First synthesized as a diamond substitute, SiC has the advantage of low weight: the entire support structure with its detectors is only 20 kg.
Gaia will operate at the Earth–Sun L2 Lagrange point, 1,5 million kilometers behind the earth, when looking from the sun, where Earth’s orbital motion balances out gravitational forces to form a stable point in space. As the spinning Gaia’s two telescopes sweep across the sky, the images of stars in each field of view will move across the focal plane array, divided into four fields variously dedicated to star mapping, position and motion, colour and intensity and spectrometry.

Scheduled for launch in 2013, Gaia’s three-dimensional star map will help to reveal the composition, formation and evolution of the Milky Way, sampling 1% of our Galaxy’s stars.

Gaia should also sample large numbers of other celestial bodies, from minor bodies in our own Solar System to more distant galaxies and quasars near the edge of the observable Universe.

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Last Space Shuttle mission launched

Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched today at 17:29 CEST (15:29 GMT) to the International Space Station on a mission that will end the multi-purpose space plane programmer’s three-decade era of human spaceflight.

 

Atlantis will dock after about 2 days with the orbital outpost on Sunday at 17:09 CEST (15:09 GMT) and the four new astronaut arrivals will float into the Station about two hours later where currently the ISS Expedition 28 crew consisting of two American and one Japanese astronauts and 3 Russian cosmonauts permanently live and work in space.

Atlantis is carrying the Italian-built Raffaello pressurized logistics module filled with vital supplies and spares. On the journey down, it will return a range of items to Earth. Also all the samples from the on-board MELFI freezers will be returned to Earth in thermally conditioned state for analysis by the scientists.

Raffaello will be berthed at the Node-2 port on Monday and, after unloading its precious cargo, it will be detached again on Sunday 17 July and put back by the Space Station robotic arm into the Shuttle cargo bay.  

Two of the Shuttle astronauts will make a spacewalk on Tuesday 12 July to recover a Station ammonia pump that recently failed. It will be returned to Earth for engineers to probe the causes.

Atlantis will leave the Station again on Monday 18 July at 07:59 CEST (05:59 GMT).

The final Shuttle landing at the Kennedy Space Center is planned for Wednesday 20 July at 13:06 CEST (11:06 GMT).