Over the span of two years, two teams of astronomers have worked tirelessly to discover what can now be presented as the largest reservoir of water ever detected, and it’s in space.
A 12-billion-year old body of water has been found, and it is believed to be the largest reservoir in the universe.
The significant discovery was only possible thanks to the work of a team led by Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who began observations in 2008.
Bradford’s team used a 33-foot telescope close to the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to make their initial observations before following up with observations from a range of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
The other team of astronomers, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, made use of the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find the water.
The nature of the space water
The reservoir is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in our planet’s oceans. It exists more than 12 billion light-years away and flanks an enormous, feeding black hole known as a quasar. These black holes are massive celestial objects and emit enormous amounts of energy.
Bradford highlighted that the environment around the quasar was unique in the sense that it produces a large mass of water. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” he said in a press release about the discovery.
Before the discovery of the enormous reservoir, astronomers had not been able to detect water vapor in existence this far into the early universe. There exists water in other parts of the Milky Way, but most of it is frozen in ice.
Upon this finding, scientists were able to establish that the quasar is effectively bathing the gas in x-rays and infrared radiation. The gas is “unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards,” according to a press release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“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,” the release explains.
According to the NASA website, “The Hubble Space Telescope peered into the Helix Nebula and found water molecules. Hydrogen and oxygen, formed by different processes, combine to make water molecules in the ejected atmosphere of this dying star. The origins of our oceans are in the stars.”
“Water molecules exist in the Orion Nebula and are still forming today,” NASA maintains on its website. “The nebula is composed mostly of hydrogen gas; other molecules are comparatively rare.”
