Science News
Vastly more water than in ocean surrounds black hole
Jul 22, 2011, 19:55 GMT
Washington - A giant black hole is surrounded by a cloud of water vapor many trillions of times larger than all the water in Earth's oceans, astronomers said Friday.
The finding is the largest, most distant water reservoir ever discovered, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
The vapor surrounds a quasar, as black holes feeding on surrounding material are known, some 12 billion light-years from Earth. The water amounts to an estimated 140 trillion times that in Earth's oceans.
'It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,' said scientist Matt Bradford.
The quasar is 20 billion times larger than the sun and was studied by two separate groups of astronomers.
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