Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water

摘要

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe, according to NASA. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all water in the world's oceans, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away. (A single light-year measures about 6 trillion miles.) "The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research is partially funded by NASA and has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.