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The largest reservoir of water in the universe-APM 08279+5255 Quasar

The cosmos stores a huge amount of secrets and we are always curious about understanding them. We are always in search of water as we believe the presence of water may lead us to find a habitable place and it can also help us trace back our origins. Scientists recently discovered such a reservoir in space.

The largest and most distant reservoir of water ever found in the cosmos has been found by two teams of astronomers. A massive, consuming black hole known as a quasar, located more than 12 billion light-years distant, is encircled by water that is 140 trillion times as much as all the water in the oceans of the world. Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the environment surrounding this quasar is very special because it is creating this enormous quantity of water.


An enormous black hole that slowly consumes a disc of gas and dust around it powers quasars. The quasar spews out enormous quantities of energy as it consumes. Both teams of scientists focused on the APM 08279+5255 quasar, which contains a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and emits enough energy to power a trillion suns. This quantity of water existed when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old because it took 12 billion years for the light from the quasar (the APM 08279+5255 quasar in the constellation Lynx, to be precise) to reach Earth.

APM 08279+5255 Quasar

Photo credit-nasa.gov

Although water vapor was predicted to exist even in the early, far-off cosmos, it had never been found at this distance before. Because the majority of the Milky Way's water is frozen in ice, there is water vapor there, though the total quantity is 4,000 times lower than in the quasar. At least 100,000 times the mass of the sun, or 34 billion times the mass of Earth, is the quantity of water that is anticipated to be present in the quasar.


An essential residual gas that sheds light on the quasar's characteristics is water vapor. In this specific quasar, a gaseous region hundreds of light-years in size contains water vapor spread around the black hole. (a light-year is about six trillion miles). The fact that it is there suggests that the quasar is irradiating the gas with X-rays and infrared radiation and that it is exceptionally warm and dense compared to other gas in the universe. The gas is five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what is normal in galaxies like the Milky Way, despite being 300 trillion times less dense and at a frigid minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) than Earth's atmosphere.


Scientists at the California Institute of Technology commanded a team of astronomers who used the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California to find the water reservoir.

Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, Hawaii

Photo credit-submm.caltech.edu

The millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which are halfway between infrared and microwave wavelengths, are the observational range of both devices. This method has made it possible for astronomers to discover trace gases, such as water vapor, in the earliest cosmos over the past twenty to thirty years. Scientists are looking for more such amazing objects in the cosmos using advanced technology.


Stay tuned for more such surprising details about the universe.

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