Friday, August 12, 2011

Astronomers Discovered Largest and Farthest Reservoir of Water

Two teams of astronomers discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.The water in the reservoir is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean. The water surrounds a huge feeding black hole, called a quasar more than 12 billion light years away.

 A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. Astronomers studied a quasar called APM 08279+5255. This quasar harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much as energy as a thousand trillion suns. The water vapour was expected to be present in the early distant universe. There is water vapour in the Milky Way but 4000 times less than in the quasar. It is because most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in ice.

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