It's amazing how one's perceptions change over time. It was only about two years ago that I blogged my amazement that water was being discovered on Mars. Now I find a report in National Geographic of a
star that is shooting water into space:
Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.
The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.
"If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second," said Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
"We are talking about velocities reaching 200,000 kilometers [124,000 miles] per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun," said Kristensen, lead author of the new study detailing the discovery, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The mind boggles. Truly.
This is so cool. As far as our current perception goes, water means life so this has great implications.
ReplyDeleteIt's simply amazing and gives a much better hint as to how frequent water may be in other solar systems.
ReplyDeleteThe universe could be full of the stuff.
i just got goosebumps from reading this
ReplyDeleteThis sounds cool, but...
ReplyDelete1. Why did they show an artist's conception instead of the real image from a telescope?
2. Do they explain where the Oxygen came from for the water?
3. They conceptualize black holes the same way, and black holes aren't su[[osed to allow anything - not even light - out, yet there is energy being jetted out at the axis of roatation. And then they don't explain the contradiction - and it is a BIG contradiction; a black hole doesn't just have extreme gravity at its stellar equator - that is a ridiculous concept.
So, without more actual facts and direct photos, I don't give this much credence, other than their wet dream. I think they either are reading the data wrong, or they have concepts that aren't correct.
Re me Oxygen comment: Helium is created by fusion in stars. The elements heavier than Helium are supposedly formed by novas and supernovas. But protostars are not where novas occur. Oxygen simply is not floating around in space, so where did the Oxygen come from to make the water? Granted, they must be detecting water, but they don't explain where it is supposed to be coming from.
ReplyDelete