Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.

Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.

In July 2011, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that two teams of astronomers had detected an enormous mass of water vapour around a quasar called APM 08279+5255, more than 12 billion light-years away. The quantity was put at the equivalent of 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans. JPL described it at the time as the largest and most distant reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The figure is real and the findin…