NASA just found the largest reservoir of water in the universe, and it’s not on Earth – teach me about science

The largest amount of water ever discovered in the universe is about 140 trillion times the amount of water present in Earth’s oceans. The most amazing thing about all this is that it powers a supermassive black hole!

These findings were presented a decade ago by two teams of astronomers. Water surrounds a massive active quasar black hole, more than 12 billion light-years away. Quasars are active galaxy nuclei in which supermassive black holes draw in material from the surrounding disk—in other words, feed it. In some quasars, the black hole creates a jet that shoots out at nearly the speed of light.

Because light had to travel over 12 billion years to reach our telescopes, we are seeing water that was only present about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. This makes this discovery the largest and oldest water reserve ever discovered.

A quasar is fed by a massive black hole that constantly consumes its surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar emits enormous amounts of energy. They are so incredibly bright that they can be detected at great distances, making the most distant objects relatively easy to spot.

Teams of astronomers studied a specific quasar called APM 08279+5255, which contains a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the Sun and produces as much energy as a quadrillion Suns, according to NASA. The water is in the form of vapor and is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region hundreds of light years in size. A light year is about 9.5 billion kilometers.

“Its presence indicates that the quasar bathes the gas in X-ray and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually hot and dense by astronomical standards. Yet the gas is 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and 300 billion times that of Earth’s atmosphere. Although less dense, it is still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than normal in galaxies like the Milky Way,” NASA officials wrote in a statement.

Based on measurements of water vapor and other molecules such as carbon monoxide, astronomers suggest that there is enough gas to fuel the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. It is not clear, however, as some gas may condense into stars or escape from quasars.

Surely this is still not in the minds of many people, because for a long time it was believed that the earth is a unique and privileged place that contains water. But water is everywhere, in fact, it is one of the most abundant molecules. Water is formed when two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom come together, so, in theory, there could be a lot of water in outer space.