Mayukh Saha
Mayukh Saha
April 12, 2024 ·  3 min read

Absolutely Massive 12-Billion-Year-Old Body of Water Found Floating in Space

Scientists have found the universe’s largest water reserve, but it’s not on Earth. It’s said to be floating in space. There is a huge body of water in space that has been found by two science teams. It is said to be 12 billion years old. The body of water is much bigger than all the water on Earth. Scientists also think it’s 140 trillion times bigger than all the water in the world’s seas.

The universe’s largest and farthest water reservoir

But because the body of water is around a quasar, a huge black hole that feeds on other black holes, which is more than 12 billion years away, it’s not likely that you would be able to see it with a microscope. From what experts have found, the universe was only 1.6 billion years old at one point.

Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the find only showed that water exists in space. “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.”

A lot of energy is released by quasars, which are very large objects in space. In all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, supermassive black holes make electromagnetic waves when gas and dust fall into their cores. The quasar APM 08279+5255 was the subject of their studies. It has a black hole that is 20 billion times more huge than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.

In their research, Bradford’s team found many spectral marks in the water, which gave them more information, especially about how heavy it was. In the very early world, scientists had never seen water vapor before. There is water all over the Milky Way, but most of it is covered in ice. The authors of this study considered building a 25-meter telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert to help us learn more about the universe far away.

Which body of water holds the most water on Earth?

The ocean holds 97.3% of all the water on Earth, making it the largest body of water in the world. This is, of course, salt water, and it is deadly unless it is treated to get rid of the salt. The next biggest water sources are glaciers and polar ice, which hold a little more than 2% of the world’s water.

Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, have thought about taking icebergs out of the Arctic and using them as sources of fresh water, but this is usually not an option because it would cost too much. Groundwater is where most drinking water comes from. If you keep drilling into the ground, you will eventually reach water. Water seeps through the cracks and pores in the rock, and how much water the Earth can hold depends on how porous it is. Because the holes are full of air, the ground might not be wet when you dig.

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