NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html

by tomeast • 15 years ago

143 85 15 years ago

thirsteh• 15 years ago

And there goes Stephen Hawking's fearmongering about hostile aliens barbecuing us for our water.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

Keep in mind it's a huge amount of water, scattered through a mindboggingly huge volume. It's a very tenuous vacuum with more water then the surrounding vacuum, but, still, pretty good vacuum.

__rkaup__• 15 years ago

Where did he write about that?

iqster• 15 years ago

http://www.millennium3.info/2010/04/26/stephen-hawking-says-...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/25/stephen-hawking-ali...

Edit: Okay ... I give up. I wasted a lot of time googling for an original source or a video where Hawking actually said these things. My Google search skillz are off this early in the AM and I can't bear to see more ads associated with 1 minute clips. The story that humans should stop trying to contact aliens (attributed to Hawking) became quite popular a few years ago. I even recall someone from SETI saying how this is not what they are doing ... rather, they are merely listening for signals from intelligent life that may exist rather than attempting to initiate contact.

vnchr• 15 years ago

Good thing we cut their funding!

mattdeboard• 15 years ago

I understand NASA's PR team wants to make these headlines appealing to general audiences, and generate pageviews, but they're making the mistake of overpromising in the headline and underdelivering in the copy.

To normal people -- i.e. Not HackerNews readers -- read reservoir and think of a resource we can tap for our curren needs, a "reserve" of water. It's not that at all. NASA's PR team isn't doing their scientists any favors. It's not some egregious sin or anything but I'd have chosen a different headline altogether. Or maybe I'm just being a nitpicky former PR guy.

sorbus• 15 years ago

The title on HN ("NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans") is not the title NASA uses on its article ("Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water"). It appears to be have created by mashing together the first two sentences of the article - the first describes it as a reservoir, the second describes its size relative to the earth's oceans.

Don't blame NASA, blame the submitter.

podperson2• 15 years ago

I'd blame NASA for using the word "reservoir".

rwmj• 15 years ago

I guess that rules out the plot of "V" ...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/V_%281983_min...

petegrif• 15 years ago

That is insane.

willidiots• 15 years ago

Better get started on the pipeline. LA's residents are thirsty.

uvdiv• 15 years ago

LA residents are sitting next to an ocean. If they want water, they should elect a government that will allow them to build desalination plants, as opposed to one which creates artificial scarcity.

sek• 15 years ago

I don't know what to do with these numbers. I can relate to our ocean in some way, 2 times, 5 times, maybe 10 times the amount of water but higher numbers are too much for me.

They should just use liter instead.

1880• 15 years ago

Earth holds about 1.26x10^21 liters (source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophys...). So 140 trillion times that would be 1.764x10^35, or about 176 decillion liters.

I don't know what to do with these numbers either.

brass_cannon4• 15 years ago

Given that the difference between our calculations is a result of the margin of error in determining the Earth's ocean's volume, I wonder what the margin of error is for NASA's measurement.

brass_cannon4• 15 years ago

1.918 * 10^35 cubic liters [1]

[1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml

Cushman14• 15 years ago

Can anyone come up with a good comparison for this? A sphere the size of Mercury's orbit is an order too large (~ 1.4e36L according to Wolfram Alpha).

Edit: Of course Mercury's orbit isn't spherical, but we're talking ballpark here :P

tucaz• 15 years ago

How the hell they found something that is xx billion light years away? Isn't that xx the amount of time that light (or whatever else) needs to get here so they can see/measure it?

hollerith• 15 years ago

Well, the light (well, x-rays, I think in this case) has been transiting space for billions of years, then astronomers collected it. Astronomers collect light that was produced billions of years ago every day.

Hope that helps!

ComputerGuru• 15 years ago

In particular, this means that 12 billion years ago, there WAS a reservoir of water of such and such size.... :-)

distort• 15 years ago

Which also means that what we see now is the light that finally reached us and that "image" is old by a billion years.

extension3• 15 years ago

The universe is roughly 14 billion years old, so events at this distance are near the beginning of it.

palish3• 15 years ago

Keeping in mind, people 200 years from now may look back on this comment and go "Ha ha, people used to think crazy things like 'the universe is only 14 billion years old'".

sliverstorm8• 15 years ago

Really? I would have thought since we are expanding outwards, an event could be really far away simply because it is on the other side of the nexus. In other words, the universe is (28 billion) * (speed of expansion) across, rather than 14 billion

rkalla• 15 years ago

Space is web-scale (how has no one else made this joke yet?)

palish3• 15 years ago

I don't get it. (But I didn't downvote.)

justhw• 15 years ago

12 billion light years away huh? hmmm

xhuang• 15 years ago

isn't it also means there was that much water xx billion light years ago, it could be all gone now!

Cushman14• 15 years ago

Nope. "Right now, over there" is a phrase which has no meaning on astronomical scales. There is no defined order for events which don't have a causal connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

There exists a frame of reference in which the state that we see in that image takes place at the same time as we read about it today. There's another frame of reference where it happens billions of years ago, before the formation of the Earth; another in which it happens in our future, long after our Sun has evaporated into nothingness (Ed: There isn't actually, see below). All of these perspectives are literally, completely equally valid. They're all real.

There was a good discussion about this last time it came up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907271

sliverstorm8• 15 years ago

Your parent's point was simple and practical, not bound up in relativity. Parent was merely observing that even though we see it (please do not launch off into a metaphysical discussion about "what is seeing"), if we were to go visit it, it could no longer be there for use to "use".

omarchowdhury2• 15 years ago

I fail to see how "right now, over there" fails to have any meaning when at this very moment that point in space does exist, the assumption is that we are moving between there and here without any lag (instantly) when comparing the sets of areas.

In our minds, where the comparison is taking place, we need not account for how long it takes light to travel. We can simultaneously hold the thought that we are here on Earth, and way over there, there once was a giant cloud of water vapor.

thret• 15 years ago

Have you considered exactly which frame of reference would be required for it to appear to happen in our future?

harshavr• 15 years ago

I am no expert on this, but if you assume the cosmological principle which states that our universe is roughly isotropic, there is a natural set of observers called comoving observers who are at rest with respect to the expansion of the universe. One can define a universal time using the clocks of these observers. Presumably, this is what gives meaning to statements like the universe is 14 billion years old.

dhughes2• 15 years ago

Not as good as the giant cloud of alcohol http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Jodrell_Bank_Astronomers_S...

smallblacksun• 15 years ago

I'm holding out for the giant cloud of beer.

jdavid• 15 years ago

If NASA is right about where there is water there is life, and or hydrogen drives, then if there are billions of FTL species maybe they would (lol) gravitate to a trillion planets worth of water.

"just saying that it might be a good place to look for more interesting communication signals."

walkon• 15 years ago

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.

How could they possibly know this?

sambeau• 15 years ago

I am not an astronomer but I would guess they know this the same way they know what anything in distant space (that does not give off light of its own) is made-up of: they observe the light shining through it and see which part of the spectrum is/is not filtered by it.

sigzero• 15 years ago

Exactly. They "know" but they don't "know". You know?

kingkawn• 15 years ago

aka empirical evidence, yes, that is the basis of science.

sbierwagen• 15 years ago

It's phrased oddly, and I haven't read the original paper; but I assume they just measured the spectra of its infrared blackbody radiation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body

Just like how a noncontact infrared thermometer works, except you have to use a space-based telescope, due to the water in our atmosphere.

jff• 15 years ago

Based on the HN headline, I was hoping it was in the solar system, like they just discovered the asteroid belt contained far more water than they thought before... could be very useful for future space applications.

This is pretty cool too though.

swombat• 15 years ago

A cloud containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in our oceans would be pretty hard to miss if it was in our solar system! In fact, it might be bigger than our solar system... Anyone care to do the quick estimate math? (I'm on an iPad, impractical...)

chronomex• 15 years ago

That would be a sphere of water with radius <0.25AU: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.3+billion+cubic+kilom...

(Ocean volume figure is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean )

NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans

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