Artist's concept of a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where a team of astronomers including CU-Boulder discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Illustration courtesy NASA/ESA
An international team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.
The distant quasar is one of the most powerful known objects in the universe and has an energy output of 1,000 trillion suns -- about 65,000 times that of the Milky Way galaxy. The quasar's power comes from matter spiraling into the central supermassive black hole, estimated at some 20 billion times the mass of our sun, said study leader Matt Bradford of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Because the quasar -- essentially a voraciously feeding black hole -- is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion light years to arrive at Earth. Since one light year equals about 6 trillion miles, the observations reveal a time when the universe was very young, perhaps only 1.6 billion years old. Astronomers believe the universe was formed by the Big Bang roughly 13.6 billion years ago.
Read More: http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/986612970517c339919c6e0eecf0f4a0.html
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