The largest reservoir of water ever discovered in the universe is a massive cloud of water vapor surrounding a
quasar named APM 08279+5255.
Located more than 12 billion light-yearsaway, this cosmic reservoir was first reported in 2011 by two independent teams of astronomers led by scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Key Facts About the Reservoir
- Massive Scale: The cloud contains 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
- Ancient Origins: Because it is 12 billion light-years away, astronomers are seeing it as it existed when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old. This discovery proved that water was abundant very early in cosmic history.
- Extreme Environment: The water exists as a warm, dense vapor swirling around a supermassive black hole that is 20 billion times the mass of our Sun.
- Comparison: For perspective, this single reservoir holds at least 4,000 times more water vapor than is present in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Location and Scientific Context
The quasar APM 08279+5255 is an extremely luminous and active galactic core. The intense energy it emits—equivalent to 1,000 trillion Suns—heats the surrounding gas and dust, creating the conditions necessary for such a vast amount of water vapor to form.
The discovery was made using advanced instruments like Z-Spec at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps.
The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team’s research is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. 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.
Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before. There’s water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in ice.
Water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size (a light-year is about six trillion miles). Its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. 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.
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