Largest and farthest reservoir of water in the universe discovered

Astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.

The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

The astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbours a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the Sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion Suns.

“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, who leads one of the two teams that made the discovery.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” he stated.

The study appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.