Astronomers Detected 140 Trillion Earth Oceans of Water Vapor Around Quasar APM 08279+5255
Updated
Updated · spacedaily.com · May 29
Astronomers Detected 140 Trillion Earth Oceans of Water Vapor Around Quasar APM 08279+5255
1 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · May 29
Summary
More than 12 billion light-years away, quasar APM 08279+5255 is surrounded by water vapor totaling about 140 trillion Earth oceans—the largest and most distant such detection reported.
Two teams found the vapor independently: Caltech's Dariusz Lis detected one water signature in 2010, and JPL's Matt Bradford identified several more spectral lines that allowed the mass estimate.
Hundreds of light-years across, the cloud is not an ocean-like body but extremely diffuse gas—about 300 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere—even though it is unusually warm and dense for galactic gas.
A 20 billion-solar-mass black hole powers the quasar, whose intense infrared and X-ray radiation lights the gas and makes the water lines visible.
Seen when the universe was under 2 billion years old, the vapor matters less as a surprise than as a tracer for studying temperature and density around an early-universe galaxy.