Astronomers Discover Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water

Two teams of scientists, including one from , have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe, the space agency reported Friday.

The astronomers sized the body of water at 140 trillion times the water in all the earth's oceans, according to JPL's website. The scientists said the reservoir surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

"It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times," JPL scientist Matt Bradford is quoted in the space agency's article. Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. Bradford's quote garnered nearly 40 comments on JPL's Facebook page by Friday afternoon.

While astronomers had expected water vapor to be present in the early, distant universe, no one has detected it this far away before.

The observations by Bradford's team started in 2008. They used an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology's Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot telescope in Hawaii.

The second team of scientists, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water, the website states.

Bradford's team gleaned more information about the water, including its humongous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water.