Exploring Space's Most Bizarre and Enigmatic Discoveries

7. The Biggest and Farthest Water Storage Facility

Found Year: 2011. Caltech Submillimeter Observatory made the discovery. Where: APM 08279+5255 Quasar Since, let's face it, without water, civilization will not survive, finding a supply of water suitable for human existence is at the centre of much of the upcoming space exploration programme. The finding of a lifetime was made in 2011 by astronomers at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory using the 33-foot-long Z-Spec spectrograph, a millimetre telescope.

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The Greatest and Farthest Water Storage Facility ©Shutterstock/IgorZh But not in this lifetime, please. It was discovered that a cloud surrounding the black hole of the quasar APM 08279+5255 possessed a reservoir that held more water than all of Earth's seas put together.

8. Stars

Found Year: 1962 It was discovered by Maarten Schmidt. Location: Multiple Sites John Bolton and his colleagues at the University of Sydney were the first to observe the blue celestial objects that resemble stars and produce radio waves in the early 1960s. But details regarding 3C 273, the first quasar, weren't released until 1962, when Maarten Schmidt conducted a more thorough examination (using the Hale optical telescope).

Quasars © Shutterstock/Jurik Peter Supermassive black holes are thought to be the source of energy for quasars, which have the capacity to emit energy equivalent to 1,000 trillion times that of the Sun. According to one theory, learning more about quasars could reveal some of the mysteries surrounding the early galaxy's evolution.