The water vapor was found 11.5 billion light years from Earth, using the 100-meter Effelsberg radio telescope at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Leipzig, Germany.

A light year is the amount of time it takes for light to travel through space in a single year.

Astronomers say the water vapor is in the form of a disc, called a maser, orbiting a black hole.

Originally posted by Phage

The liquid kind, the kind that's useful, has been elusive. There's only one place we've run across it so far.

[edit on 12/17/2008 by Phage]

These images show that a material flowed down through a gully channel, once between December 2001 and April 2005. After the flow stopped, it left behind evidence -- the light-toned deposit. The deposit is thin enough that its thickness cannot be measured in the camera's 1.5-meters-per-pixel images. However, it does exhibit a digitate termination, suggesting that the material flowed in a fluid-like manner down the approximately 25 degree slope before splaying out into multiple small lobes at the point where the crater wall meets the crater floor and the slope suddenly drops to near zero. This deposit, and a similar one in a crater in the Centauri Montes, together suggests that the materials involved were low-volume debris flows containing a mixture of sediment and a liquid that had the physical properties of liquid water. In this case, we propose that the water came from below the surface, emerged somewhere beneath the mantle covering the original crater wall, and then ran down through a previously existing gully channel. No new gully was formed, but an old one was re-activated.