It took a dedicated three-year effort by two different teams of astronomers to discover the largest and most distant reservoir of water ever found in the universe. This massive discovery, which turned out to be about 12 billion years old, showcases the incredible wonders beyond our earthly bounds.
The journey began in 2008 with a team led by Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Bradford and his team started their astronomical adventure using a 33-foot telescope located near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They later expanded their observations through an array of radio dishes situated in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
Simultaneously, another group of astronomers, guided by Dariusz Lis, a senior research associate in physics at Caltech and the deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, employed the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to further the research.
The scale of the water they found is truly staggering—it’s equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans, making it a celestial feature of unimaginable proportions.
Located more than 12 billion light-years away, this vast body of water encircles a quasar—a type of enormously energetic astronomical object. Quasars are known for emitting incredible amounts of energy, and this particular quasar is no exception, feeding voraciously on the surrounding matter.
Bradford expressed his fascination with the environment around the quasar, describing it as “very unique” due to the significant amount of water being produced there. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” Bradford remarked in a 2011 press release. Prior to this monumental find, astronomers had not detected water vapor this far back in the cosmos. While there is water elsewhere in the Milky Way, it is mostly in the form of ice.
This groundbreaking discovery has not only provided insights into the presence of water in the early universe but also offered clues about the conditions surrounding the quasar. Scientists were able to determine that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, leading to an unusual warm and dense state of the gas. Despite the gas being at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it is still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what is typically seen in galaxies like the Milky Way.
As astronomers continue to peer deeper into the distant universe, they remain hopeful that future research will unveil even more about our vast and mysterious cosmos.