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(EndPlay Staff Reports) - Two teams of astronomers have found the universe's largest reservoir of water, a press release from the California Institute of Technology states.

The press release states that the teams, each led by Caltech scientists, found a mass of water vapor at least as big as 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans. The mass is 100,000 times bigger than the sun and is located in a quasar 30 billion trillion miles away.

That means the quasar, the International Business Times reported, is 12 billion light years away. That means the water had existed since the universe was 1.6 billion years old, considered relatively young when thinking astronomically.

It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a visiting associate at Caltech, stated in the press release.

Wired reported the water vapor was found hidden in the distant APM 08279+5255 quasar. 

Quasars, which are violent and gigantic, are fueled by black holes at their center. This specific quasar has a black hole 20 billion times larger than the sun that, after taking in dust and gas, spews out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.

Wired said scientists made the observations using special instruments in observatories in Hawaii and southern California. Each instrument observes light in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which are between infrared and microwave wavelengths.

These tools over the past few decades have let astronomers find trace gases including water vapor in the earliest universe.