12-billion-year-old body of water discovered floating in space
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Dawam Syah/500px/Robert Brook/Getty Images
While we have become accustomed to experts finding the likes of asteroids and black holes knocking about in space, water is not nearly as common.
However, a discovery made last year well and truly blew any previous discovery out of the water (pun intended).
In 2011, two teams of astronomers discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected the universe - and it left a lot of space geeks excited.
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What made this discovery particularly interesting is the fact the body of the water is significantly larger than any water discovered on Earth.
Scientists estimated in their findings the body of water found is the equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean.
That's a lot of water.
But before space enthusiasts had the opportunity to take a look at the body of water from their telescope, they were stopped in their tracks.
That is because the water surrounds a huge black hole called a quasar, which is more than 12 billion light-years away.
The observations made by the scientists have revealed a time where the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.
Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, spoke of the discovery and said it showed that water can be found throughout the universe.
"The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water,” he said.
"It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."
Quasars are considered massive celestial objects and emit large amounts of energy. Gas and dust falling into a supermassive black hole, that are at the centre, emit electromagnetic radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. So a fair bit.
Bradford’s team was able to get more information about the water, most notably its incredible mass as they detected several spectral signatures of the water.
The water vapor is spread across an area hundreds of light-years in size, and is a frosty -53 °C, which bizarrely is actually pretty warm by space standards.
Prior to this discovery, astronomers had never found water vapor present this far back in the early universe. There is water elsewhere in the Milky Way - however, most of it is frozen in ice.
The more you know.