Saturday, July 23, 2011

Water is plentiful in the universe

From a story at physorg today:
Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar—one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos—the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.
You know what this means, don't you? Life is everywhere! Read the story. This water existed when the universe was just an infant, so water has been around almost forever. Amazing news.