Misty reservoir would fill 140 trillion Earth oceans, scientists say.

Black hole hosts Universe's most massive water cloud. In a galaxy 12 million light-years away resides the most distant and most massive cloud of water yet seen in the universe, astronomers say. "Weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth, the giant cloud of mist sweddles a type of actively feeding supermassive black hole known as a quasar..."

Among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, quasars are black holes at the centers of galaxies that are grabitationally consuming surounding disks of material while burping back our powerful energy jets, and the vapor around this particular quasar represents enough water "to fill all the oceans on the earth over 140 trillion times--that is a lot of water."

It was found that the wet black hole using a spectrograph attached to the ten-meter Caltech Submillimeter Observatory on the summit of Manuna Kea in Hawaii. "As this disk of material is consumed by the central black hole, it releases energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiation, which in turn can heat the surrounding material, resulting in the pbserved water vapor," said study co-author Eric Murphy, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. In fact, there's enough gas and dust present that the black hole could grow to be 6 times its current size--or more than 120 billion times the mass of our sun, Murphy said. Astronomers are hoping to use the find to study how large quantities of water in the young universe may have acted as efficient collants of the interstellar medium--the thin gas and dust that exists between stars--possibly affecting star formation and the evolution of galaxies such as our Milky Way.