Two teams of astronomers led by scientists from the Californa Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered the largest and most distant reservoir of water ever detected in the Universe . The mass of water found would be equivalent to several billion times that of all that exists on Earth.
Specifically, the amount of water would be 140 trillion times the sum of all the Earth’s oceans or about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. For Matt Bradford, a NASA scientist associated with Caltech, “this is another demonstration that water is omnipresent throughout the universe, even in its earliest stages. “
The body of water has been found in the form of a large vapor ring around a quasar at a distance of about 48 billion trillion kilometers away. This quasar is located 12,000 million light years from Earth, so what is now being seen actually happened when the Universe was 1,600 million years old, less than a tenth of its current age.
The presence of this water vapor also reveals important clues about the nature of the quasar, named APM 08279 + 5255 and at the center of which is a black hole, and the existence of this water vapor indicates that the gas is unusually dense with respect to astronomical standards. It is, for example, 5 times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than in typical galaxies like the Milky Way . “The conditions around this quasar are unique to be producing these amounts of water,” acknowledged Bradford.
