Day 4: APM 08279+5255

This artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM 08279+5255, where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapor. Credit: NASA/ESA 

APM 08279+5255 from an artist's perspective. Credit: Wikipedia

This is the ocean at South Beach, Miami. When you look at it, doesn't it amaze you how much water there is just in that one fraction of the ocean? Well, wait until you compare that to the water reservoir located more than 12 billion light years away. The water is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean. According to NASA, "It surrounds a feeding black hole, called a quasar."

A few months ago, two teams of astronomers found the largest and farthest reservoir of water so far in the universe. To put things in perspective, U.S.G.S. estimates there to be approximately 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometers of water in Earth's ocean. There's 1 trillion liters in a cubic kilometer. That's 1.33800*10^21 liters of water in our ocean. Sounds like a lot, huh? Well, put it in contrast with the amount of water surrounding APM 08279+5255. There's 140 trillion times the amount of all the water in Earth's ocean surrounding APM 08279+5255.

APM 08279+5255 is a feeding black hole, which can also be called quasars, more than 12 billion light-years away. Quasars, by definition, are very energetic, active galactic nuclei. Active galatic nuclei (AGN) are galaxies that spew massive amounts of energy from their center. According to NASA, "A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy." And, incase you were wondering, water vapor is the gaseous state of water. We can infer that this quasar, APM 08279+5255 is "feeding off"the water vapor. Actually, believe it or not, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region hundreds of light-years long, and every light year is 6 trillion miles long.

Interesting Fact: APM 08279+5255, harbors a black hole that is 20 billion times the size of our sun and it produces as much energy as a quadrillion suns.