An estimated 1.386 million trillion litres of natural water exists on Earth. If this figure seems overwhelming, consider travelling 9.26 million times from Earth to the Sun. Should the water on Earth be dispersed like a road with a width of one metre and a depth of one metre, this “road” would go well beyond the Oort Cloud, which is the solar system’s farthest known point.
However, the largest and furthest known reservoir of water in the cosmos was found by two teams of astronomers. The water amounts to approximately 140 trillion times the amount of water in the Earth’s oceans. This finding recently resurfaced in the social media discussions.
As if that weren’t incredible enough, the massive volume of water was discovered to be around 12 billion years old.
The momentous finding was only possible because of the efforts of a team led by Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who started researching in 2008.
Bradford’s team conducted preliminary observations using a 33-foot telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
They subsequently supplemented their findings with data from other radio dishes located in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
The water was located by the second team of astronomers using the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps, which is overseen by Dariusz Lis, a senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory.
The water surrounds a quasar, which is a massive, feeding black hole.
Large quantities of energy are released by quasars, which are regarded as huge celestial objects.
Bradford observed that the quasar’s surrounding environment is “very unique” in that it is generating a “huge mass of water.”
According to a 2011 press release announcing the discovery, “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
Water vapour had never been seen thus far back in the early cosmos by astronomers before the massive amount of water was discovered.
Although the Milky Way galaxy is filled with water, a substantial portion is frozen in ice.
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