Universe's largest, earliest water mass found
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Science@NASA
PASADENA: The largest and farthest reservoir of water in the known universe has been located. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a distant quasar more than 12 billion light-years away [basal this means that 12 billion years ago there was water in the universe -adypS].
The quasar is one of the most powerful known objects in the universe and has an energy output of 1,000 trillion suns - about 65,000 times that of the Milky Way galaxy.
The quasar's power comes from matter spiraling into the central supermassive black hole, estimated at some 20 billion times the mass of our Sun, said study leader Matt Bradford of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
"The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Bradford of the research published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."