Two teams of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology have discovered the largest reservoir of water ever discovered in the universe. And it’s 30 billion trillion miles away.
Yes, you read that correctly. The largest reservoir was found in the universe, more specifically in quasars, one of the brightest and most violent celestial objects in the universe.
The mass of water vapor is at least 140 trillion times the mass of all the water in the world’s oceans combined.
Quasars are so far away that it took 12 billion years for their light to reach Earth. Observations by a research team have revealed that the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.
“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it produces this huge amount of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
“This is another piece of evidence that water pervaded the universe, even in the earliest times.”
Quasars are powered by massive black holes that consume surrounding disks of gas and dust. When a quasar is eaten, it releases a huge amount of energy.
The discovery of water wasn’t all that surprising, since astronomers expected water vapor to exist in the early universe. However, water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the properties of quasars.
This particular quasar showed water vapor distributed around a black hole in a region of gas spanning hundreds of light years (one light year is about 6 trillion miles). Its presence indicated that the gas was unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards.
Astronomers say the discovery highlights the benefits of observing at millimeter and submillimeter waves. This field has developed rapidly in recent decades, and to maximize the research potential of this field, the study authors are currently designing the 25-meter telescope CCAT, which will be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It is carried out. CCAT will enable astronomers to discover some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
You can read papers from both teams here and here.
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