The largest mass of water ever detected in the universe is equivalent to about 140 trillion times the water present in Earth’s oceans. The most surprising thing about all this is that it powers a supermassive black hole!
The findings were presented by the two teams of astronomers just over a decade ago. Water surrounds a huge active quasar black hole, more than 12 billion light years away. Quasars are active galaxy nuclei in which a supermassive black hole draws material from a surrounding disk – in other words, it is feeding. In some quasars, the black hole creates a jet that shoots out at nearly the speed of light.
Because light had to travel more than 12 billion years to reach our telescopes, we are seeing water that was present only about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. This makes this discovery the largest and oldest water reserve known to date.
A quasar is fed by a huge black hole that constantly consumes a disk of gas and dust that surrounds it. As it eats, the quasar spits out enormous amounts of energy. They are incredibly luminous that they can be detected at enormous distances, with the most distant objects being relatively easy to detect.
Teams of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which houses 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 spanning hundreds of light years in size. A light year is almost 9.5 billion kilometers.
“Its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually hot and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is a cool 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and 300 billion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it is still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than is typical. in galaxies like the Milky Way,” NASA officials write in a statement.
Based on measurements of water vapor and other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, astronomers suggest there is enough gas to fuel the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. Although it is not clear, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or being ejected from the quasar.
Surely this is still not in the minds of many, since for a long time it used to be thought that the Earth was a unique and privileged place that contains water. But there is water 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.
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