Water in the Cosmos - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 1

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Water in the Cosmos
It was 12 billion years ago, in a far corner of the early universe. A black
hole, 20 billion times more massive than our Sun, had formed. It con-
sumed everything around it. Gas, dust, and early-formed star systems
fell into its embrace, and the energy of a thousand trillion suns was
released in the appallingly brilliant light of a quasar.
What happens there now, in this time, we do not know, and can
never know. Perhaps the black hole has eaten all it can, grown yet
larger, and now sleeps. It was all a long time ago. We on Earth can,
only now, glimpse that example of ancient cosmic gluttony because
its light has finally reached us, having taken 12 billion years to travel
across the intervening space. It is an image of distant history, fossil-
ized in light beams.
Astronomers call it APM 08279+5255, a title that reveals much
about the almost limitless number of objects in the visible universe
(we have long ago run out of names such as Arcturus and Proxima
Centauri). That hellish light, though, early in its travels (over the first
100 years or so) was lighting up a material that is familiar to us, and
that, more than anything else, is us.
Water. Permeating that region of the early universe around APM
08279+5255 was a mass of water vapour sufficient to make no less