Astronomers of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the Universe. Matt Bradford made this discovery in the course of studying the environment around the quasar APM 08 279 +5255, which contains a black hole of 20 billion times more massive then the Sun and produces as much energy as thousand of trillions of suns.

Quasar APM 08 279 +5255 located more than 12 billion light-years from Earth, and as Matt said Bradford, "... the environment around the quasar is very unique because of that is saturated with water molecules."

Quasar - is a particularly powerful and distant active nucleus of the galaxy. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, since their output power of tens and sometimes hundreds of times greater, than the total capacity of all the stars of galaxies, like the Milky Way. Quasars are the most distant cosmic objects from those who do can be seen from the Earth and the quasar APM 08 279 +5255 is almost on the edge of the universe -12 billion light years from Earth, that is, at the moment we are seeing the quasar as it was 12 billion years ago. And watch this quasar may be due to the incredible luminosity, so as a quasar APM 08 279 +5255 shines more, than a thousand trillion stars like the Sun.

The most striking feature of all quasars is that they are small in size, but produce very large amounts of energy in all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly in the infrared. The properties of quasars are similar to active galactic nuclei, so many astrophysicists believe that the luminosity of quasars is not supported by fusion, and the energy of quasars - is the gravitational energy which is released by a catastrophic contraction, which occurs in the nucleus of the galaxy where the black hole.

Currently, there are many hypotheses about the nature of quasars. The most popular hypothesis according to which the quasar is a huge black hole that draws in the surrounding area, and the closer to the center of a black hole, the particles are accelerated and collide with one another, which leads to a powerful radiation in a wide spectrum of electromagnetic waves. But if there is a black hole and magnetic field, it collects the particles in the beams, which are called jets, and then the particles scatter from the pole. In other words, a powerful light that astronomers have observed - that is all that remains of the galaxy, which killed in black hole. But in another version, quasars are young galaxies, and we see the process of their development. In any case, astrophysicists very closely linked the existence of quasars, galaxies and black holes.

Quasar APM 08 279 +5255 spewing huge amounts of energy, and water located is not in liquid form around the quasar, and is distributed around a quasar at hundreds of light years away, in the form of gas and dust cloud, which is why the concentration of water molecules is very low, many times lower than the concentration of water  in the Earth's atmosphere. Because of this low concentration of water molecules are not immediately able to obtain confirmation of the existence of water around the quasar APM 08 279 +5255.

Bradford's team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology's Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy, an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

Thus, the existence of water around the quasar APM 08 279 +5255 twelve billion years ago has been confirmed, but no one knows what is now in this region of Universe.