Scientists Just Found Water Deeper In The Universe Than Ever Before

Scientists Just Found Water Deeper In The Universe Than Ever Before

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Water can be found in tons of places in the universe. Thanks to the ALMA telescope, H20 was just discovered in the furthest galaxy yet from Earth.

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Scientists Just Found Water Deeper In The Universe Than Ever Before

Outer space is a wide and expansive beast, and thanks to incredible new research from the ALMA radio telescope, scientists have just found the furthest detection of water in a galaxy. Compared to the life we know here on Earth, it can be difficult to comprehend just how large the universe truly is. Even our own galaxy is massive compared to Earth. The Milky Way has between 100 and 400 billion stars, at least 100 billion planets, and has a radius of 52,850 light-years.

But the Milky Way is just a minuscule speck compared to the entirety of the observable universe. Across the universe’s 46.5 billion light-year radius, it’s estimated that there are some 2 trillion galaxies throughout it. Each galaxy, star, and planet has its own story to tell — with each one seemingly more interesting than the last. There’s still a lot scientists have yet to uncover about the universe, but progress is being made every day. Just last week, researchers claim to have found the first planet outside the Milky Way — paving the way forward for further discoveries beyond our galaxy.

Now, another group of scientists has found something even more enthralling. Per a report from Phys.org, the ALMA radio telescope in Chile was used to detect water in the “most massive galaxy in the early universe.” The galaxy — known as SPT0311-58 — resides 12.88 billion light-years away from Earth. The finding reveals a couple of things. For one, it suggests that H20 (and carbon monoxide) were widely abundant in the very early days of the universe. It also marks the furthest water has ever been detected in a star-form galaxy in the universe.

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How Scientists Detected Water In this Galaxy

While this discovery of SPT0311-58 is fascinating enough on its own, understanding how scientists pulled it off is even more impressive. Consisting of two combined galaxies, ALMA initially detected SPT0311-58 back in 2017. Scientists decided to take a closer look at the entity, and upon doing so, found there was water in it. As explained by Sreevani Jarugula, an astronomer who led the research paper for this discovery, “Using high-resolution ALMA observations of molecular gas in the pair of galaxies known collectively as SPT0311-58 we detected both water and carbon monoxide molecules in the larger of the two galaxies.” Jarugula further explains that SPT0311-58 has “more gas and dust compared to other galaxies in the early universe, which gives us plenty of potential opportunities to observe abundant molecules and to better understand how these life-creating elements impacted the development of the early universe.”

Discoveries like this are important for a couple of reasons. Not only are they intriguing as standalone things, but they also help add context and new information to other findings. Now that scientists know water exists in a galaxy over 12 billion light-years from Earth, they can use that to learn more about the birth of not only the universe, but the Milky Way and Earth as well.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/water-found-galaxy-spt0311-58-furthest-universe-alma/

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