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NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans
- thirsteh 15y agoAnd there goes Stephen Hawking's fearmongering about hostile aliens barbecuing us for our water.
- rbanffy 15y agoKeep 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__ 15y agoWhere did he write about that?
- iqster 15y agohttp://www.millennium3.info/2010/04/26/stephen-hawking-says-alien-contact-a-bad-idea/ http://www.millennium3.info/2010/04/26/stephen-hawking-says-... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/25/stephen-hawking-aliens_n_551035.html#s84595&title=Charlie_Rose_ 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.
- Jach 15y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291969 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291969 That's a HN submission with good comments, where he basically gives the plot of independence day. I'm more worried about alien life forms due to the Great Filter problem, personally. Other life is bad news for our chances at a cosmic-proportion, galaxy-changing Singularity.
- vnchr 15y agoGood thing we cut their funding!
- mattdeboard 15y agoI 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 15y agoThe 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.
- podperson 15y agoI'd blame NASA for using the word "reservoir".
- robtoo 15y agoI really don't think the regular layperson is going to be confused into thinking we can tap into it as needed when NASA describe it as the "Most Distant Reservoir of Water" right there in the headline, the first sentence of the article describes it as the "furthest reservoir of water", and the next explains it is "12 billion light-years away". And even if this hypothetical layperson doesn't know how far a light-year is, 12 billion certainly gets across the point that it is an awful lot of them.
- Vivtek 15y agoIf we can't tap into it, then it certainly isn't a reservoir. For headline readers like myself, the choice of words is misleading.
- rwmj 15y agoI guess that rules out the plot of "V" ... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/V_%281983_min...
- petegrif 15y agoThat is insane.
- willidiots 15y agoBetter get started on the pipeline. LA's residents are thirsty.
- uvdiv 15y agoLA 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sek 15y agoI 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 15y agoEarth holds about 1.26x10^21 liters (source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question157.htm 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_cannon 15y agoGiven 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_cannon 15y ago1.918 * 10^35 cubic liters [1] [1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml
- Cushman 15y agoCan 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
- brass_cannon 15y agoI like the idea of using Mercury's orbit as a comparison. Some more fodder: Just over 13,583,569.4 times the volume of the Sun. [2] [2] http://www.smartconversion.com/otherInfo/Volume_of_planets_and_the_Sun.aspx http://www.smartconversion.com/otherInfo/Volume_of_planets_a...
- tucaz 15y agoHow 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 15y agoWell, 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 15y agoIn particular, this means that 12 billion years ago, there WAS a reservoir of water of such and such size.... :-)
- mechanical_fish 15y agoWell, yes and no. See Cushman's comment, above, on the relativity of simultaneity. In relativistic situations it really doesn't matter which verb tense you use. Verb tenses are not designed for this sort of thing.
- distort 15y agoWhich also means that what we see now is the light that finally reached us and that "image" is old by a billion years.
- extension 15y agoThe universe is roughly 14 billion years old, so events at this distance are near the beginning of it.
- palish 15y agoKeeping 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'".
- rkalla 15y agoSpace is web-scale (how has no one else made this joke yet?)
- palish 15y agoI don't get it. (But I didn't downvote.)
- justhw 15y ago12 billion light years away huh? hmmm
- xhuang 15y agoisn't it also means there was that much water xx billion light years ago, it could be all gone now!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Cushman 15y agoNope. "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 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907271
- sliverstorm 15y agoYour 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".
- Cushman 15y agoYou seem to think I'm quibbling over pedantry. I want to make it clear I'm not talking about wacky theoretical physics here, let alone metaphysics— this is hard science. You can't avoid getting "bound up in it"; relativity is, definitely is, how our world works. In our universe, "It could all be gone by now" not only isn't true, it doesn't even make logical sense. There is no one such thing as "now". Now, "It could all be gone by the time we get there" is a different, totally practical and valid statement. But that's just because of the amount of time it would take us to cross that distance; it has nothing to do with the distance that light has already traveled.
- dhughes 15y agoNot as good as the giant cloud of alcohol http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Jodrell_Bank_Astronomers_Spy_Giant_Alcohol_Cloud.html http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Jodrell_Bank_Astronomers_S...
- smallblacksun 15y agoI'm holding out for the giant cloud of beer.
- jdavid 15y agoIf 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 15y agoThere'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 15y agoI 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.
- Rene_Descartes 15y agoThey can't, silly. They can just think that they observe it.
- sbierwagen 15y agoIt'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 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 15y agoBased 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 15y agoA 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 15y agoThat would be a sphere of water with radius <0.25AU: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.3+billion+cubic+kilometres+*+140+trillion http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.3+billion+cubic+kilom... (Ocean volume figure is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean )