Supermassive black hole contains enough water to fill 'trillions of Earth-size oceans'

Astronomers enjoy it when the universe throws a curveball, and this object does exactly that. Working in two teams, they have found the largest, most distant stash of water ever seen in the cosmos. APM 08279+5255 is a quasar – an active galaxy whose central supermassive black hole feeds on gas and releases huge amounts of light.

It contains about 140 trillion times the amount in all of Earth’s oceans – swaddling a ravenous, supermassive black hole (a quasar) more than 12 billion light-years away.

Its measured redshift is z ≈ 3.87, so we see it as it looked more than ten billion years ago, when galaxies and black holes were still growing up.

For an object that distant, it looks unusually bright in both visible light and the far‑infrared. That suggests that more than one physical process is boosting the light we record.

“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. 

A second team, led by Dariusz Lis – senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory – used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to spot water.

They serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255 via a single spectral signature. Bradford’s team later picked up multiple water lines, which revealed far more detail – including the cloud’s enormous mass.

Redshift as a marker

Redshift helps us read the expanding universe. As space itself stretches, light traveling through it stretches too, shifting toward redder colors.

A redshift near 3.9 puts this quasar in the early universe and lets us estimate a look‑back time of over ten billion years. At that epoch, many galaxies were small, dusty, and faint.

Yet APM 08279+5255 breaks the pattern. Its brilliance across the spectrum tells us that some extra “help” must be amplifying its light before it reaches us.

Why APM 08279+5255 is a BAL

This quasar belongs to the BAL class – short for broad absorption line quasar. In practice, that means its spectrum shows wide dips carved out by fast winds.

Gas races outward from the central region at thousands of kilometers per second and absorbs some of the light behind it.

These winds give us a direct view of feedback: water vapor and other material falling toward the black hole can also launch outward, heating and pushing the surrounding gas. That activity shapes how stars form and how the host galaxy evolves.

How energetic is APM 08279+5255?

Initial estimates put the bolometric luminosity – the total power across all wavelengths – in the range of several quadrillion times the Sun’s luminosity.

Numbers like that demand a second look. Is the quasar really that powerful, or does something along the line of sight boost its apparent brightness?

When objects look too bright for their distance, astronomers check for gravitational lensing. Massive objects bend space‑time and can magnify background sources.

If a galaxy sits almost directly between us and a distant quasar, the quasar’s light can get amplified or even split into multiple images.

Images of APM 08279+5255 show a source that is not perfectly point‑like; it looks slightly elongated, as if two close images blur together.

Gravity’s magnifying trick

A simple, first‑order lens model – what you might call a “starter” model for a plausible foreground galaxy – suggests the optical light could be magnified by a factor of about 40.

That is a large boost. Even after we correct for this and demagnify the observed flux, the quasar still shines with tremendous intrinsic power – at least on the order of one hundred trillion Suns.

Lensing does not create energy; it redirects and concentrates it. The black hole and its fuel already produce prodigious power, and the lens allows more of that power to reach our detectors.

Dust, radio, and X‑rays

Brightness alone never tells the whole story, so we compare the quasar’s light at many wavelengths. The spectral energy distribution (SED) shows strong output in the far‑infrared as well as the optical.

That pattern signals a dust‑rich system: dust near the active nucleus soaks up energetic radiation and re‑emits it at longer wavelengths.

The SED also resembles that of another BAL quasar known to be lensed, which supports the lensing interpretation for APM 08279+5255.

Radio and X‑ray measurements line up with expectations for BAL quasars. This object looks radio‑quiet, with only modest radio emission, and earlier all‑sky surveys did not detect strong X‑rays from it. Those traits help place APM 08279+5255 firmly within the BAL family.

Why APM 08279+5255 matters

The discovery also pushes us to rethink our archives. The IRAS Faint Source Catalog is huge, and many entries never received full spectroscopic follow‑up.

If APM 08279+5255 – and a few other extreme sources – turn out to be lensed, then the catalog may still hide distant, dust‑rich, hyperluminous galaxies and quasars that pop out only because lensing boosts them above survey limits.

That possibility matters for studies of the early universe. Gravitational lensing acts like a natural telescope. It increases our effective sensitivity and sharpens details we would otherwise miss at high redshift.

With careful cross‑checks among optical, infrared, and radio surveys, we can find more cases like this and refine our picture of black hole growth, dust heating, and galaxy assembly in the first few billion years.

Lessons from APM 08279+5255

Studies of this massive quasar shows how a young, dust‑rich galaxy and its central black hole can dominate their neighborhood – while a foreground mass lends us a brighter view.

Measurements of water vapor and other molecules – like carbon monoxide – indicate there’s enough gas to let the black hole grow to roughly six times its current size.

Still, astronomers note that this outcome isn’t guaranteed; some of the gas could condense into new stars or be blown away from the quasar altogether.

The case stands on a chain of measurements across the spectrum and a lensing model that explains the excess light. The same method can reveal more distant systems hiding in plain sight in existing catalogs.

Each new find becomes another window into how galaxies and black holes grew when the universe was young – and how gravity itself helps us study them.

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Other authors on the Bradford paper, “The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255,” include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena.

Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions.

The full study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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