750 light years away, there is an interstellar fire hydrant. And it’s open to full blast. From Popsci.com:
Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they’ve found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sunlike star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.
[T]he water droplets are essentially bullets of water moving something like 80 times faster than the average round fired from a rifle. And there’s a lot of them. The amount of water ejecting from the star is equal to the amount that flows through the Amazon every second, researchers say.
Some astronomers are speculating that this is “something every protostar goes through” – which would suggest that water might be found throughout space. You can read more here.
