Standard Units Please
"140 trillion times the volume of our oceans"
How many olympic sized swimming pools is that?
A cloud of water vapour surrounding a quasar 12 billion light-years away has been spotted by two independent research groups, putting a huge mass of water in the very early universe. Two teams of sky-watching boffins spotted the cloud, confirming expectations that water existed very early in the universal life cycle. Until now …
Depends on the chemist you are referring to - the walk to the nearest chemist only seems like a "big" walk when your backs playing up and you're off to get painkillers.
If you're referring to the chemist at the other end of the high street, then yes, it is that big.
Since this is something that was actually happening 12 billion years ago, its forseeable future, is our seeable past. Either way, we can presumably presume that its forseeable future is less than 12 billion years, or else this sort of freaky stuff would still be going on in our own near-vicinity, today.
Not from that particular rainy quasar of course, but one very similar.
You're forgetting one of the fundamental principles of cosmology - the idea that the universe is and was pretty much the same all over at large scales.
So if you see a rainy quasar 12 billion years away, then it's pretty likely that 12 billion years ago there was another very similar rainy quasar right where we are.
"At that light density (300 trillion times less dense than the Earth's atmosphere, we're told)"
"The cloud is huge, containing 140 trillion times the volume of our oceans"
If that were true, the mass of water would be roughly 0.0006 that of our oceans (generously assuming sea-level air density).
The catch is that the word "volume" does not appear in the NASA article ("The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean") and it must refer to mass not volume.
It couldn't be U-235. The critical mass is only 52 kg. It probably wouldn't explode, but melt and then boil off in vacumn.
What would be cooler (and hence more inprobable) is to have an asteroid made out of Gold. Shinier, better for your bank balance, less likelier to find yourself on Terrorist watch lists, and far, far healthier for you than an asteroid made out of Uranium 238.
There are a few downsides. For example, all your mates are going to sing "GoldFINGERRR!" when you walk into the pub.
What is the pressure then? I fail physics forever.
er...
1- Water turns to steam at lower temperature when pressure is lower... eg boiling water at Everest is way lower than 100ºC. I remember my teacher turning on a vacuum pump on small amount of water enclosed in a pressure vessel and it boiled before our eyes, at 30ºC.
so...
2-The pressure there is next to nil?
3- The radiation was really cooking anything there? I heard somewhere else that the average temperature of the universe is a few deg. above 0 (zero) K. This cloud is at 220K.
4- Bumping into this thing with a spacecraft going at any decent % of the speed of light would be like sliding, while sitting on your behind without pants, on sand, at 300kph?
5- It is venting as much steam as [insert your favorite politician or reporter here] ?