Astronomers Discover Largest Reservoir of Water Ever Detected in Universe
Two teams of astronomers, led by scientists at Caltech, have made a groundbreaking discovery – the largest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. And it’s 30 billion trillion miles away.
The reservoir was found in a quasar, one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos. The mass of water vapor is at least 140 trillion times more than all the water in the world’s oceans combined.
Due to the incredible distance, the light from the quasar has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth, with the observations revealing a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.
Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), commented on the discovery, stating “The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water. It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
Quasars are powered by huge black holes that consume surrounding gas and dust, spewing out huge amounts of energy as they do so. The discovery of water vapor was not entirely unexpected, as astronomers anticipated it to be present even in the early universe. However, the presence of water vapor indicates the nature of the quasar.
This particular quasar showed water vapor being distributed around the black hole in a gas region, indicating that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards, spanning hundreds of light-years.
The discovery highlights the benefits of observing in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, with astronomers now designing CCAT, a 25-meter telescope to be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile, to reach the full potential of this line of research.
The field of millimeter and submillimeter wavelength observation has developed rapidly over the recent decades, and CCAT is expected to allow astronomers to discover some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
You can read both teams’ papers [here](link) and [here](link).