One volcano, two mountain ranges, and three years were needed for two astronomy teams to find a 12-billion-year-old body of water floating in space.
It is the universe’s largest and farthest reservoir ever found.
A group led by scientist Matt Bradford of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, started making observations in 2008 when they started utilizing a 33-foot telescope close to the top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, an extinct shield volcano.
They confirmed their findings with data made from radio dishes scattered over Southern California’s Inyo Mountains.
The water was located using the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps by a second team of astronomers under the direction of Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory
Situated 12 billion light-years away, the body of water is 140 trillion times greater than the entire ocean.
“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” Bradford stated in a 2011 press statement.
Water vapor had never been discovered this far back in the universe by scientists before. Although water has been found in other parts of the Milky Way, it is primarily frozen.
A quasar is a massive black hole surrounded by water. Massive astronomical phenomena known as quasars release enormous amounts of energy. Massive amounts of energy are released by the quasar as it consumes.
According to scientists, a gaseous area hundreds of light-years in size surrounds the black hole in this specific quasar, containing water vapor. In essence, the gas is being “bathed” in X-ray and infrared radiation. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards” in the news release.
“Although the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it’s still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what’s typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.”
Astronomers are still researching the quasar and its fuel source.
