Aliens surf on quasars

I found an article on nasa.gov (seems reputable even though they did fake the moon landing) detailing the discovery of a mass of water "equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean" (Clavin 7.22.11) found just a mere 12 Billion light-years away. The article is called "Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water" and is written by Whitney Clavin and Alan Buis. The main attraction of this study is our new friend APM 08279+5255 a quasar powered by a black hole. Here's the link. I'm no astronomer, but how I understand it, a quasar is like a lighthouse being powered by a black hole. The black hole consumes space dust and gasses and releases energy as super-luminous light, x-rays, radiation, all that fun stuff, but in this particular case the black hole is feeding off of water vapor.

I feel the article has been written for a general audience ages seventeen and up. You'll want to have an open-mind and be able to think of very large things, very far away. As I continue to revise this now I'm beginning to think maybe one would have to do some research to really understand what's going on, but the authors do help a bit. The first thing I observed is that the writers compared multiple statistics of this black hole to our sun (ex. "...20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns" (Clavin 7.22.11), instead of stating raw scientific data. Another big indicator was when the writers defined what a quasar is, "A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust" (Clavin 7.22.11).

I found this article mind-blowingly interesting; I mean come on, water in space. What else do we know about water? 'You can surf on it?' Indeed so. I imagine instead of traveling to the beach for vacation, aliens fly over to quasars for spring break. Also you might say 'It provides for life as we know it', so there's the potential... Scientists have found quite a bit of water in our own galaxy, but mostly frozen under the surface of extraterrestrial polar caps. I've also always been a fan of space in general, it's fascinating. I would like to think one day mankind will bond together for the pursuit of knowledge and happiness and we will really learn about the universe. If only we spent less time and money thinking of new ways to inflict harm on one-another, but I digress (as if my rhetoric had continuity).

The only problem with the article is it got me thinking too much! I found myself with a dozen or so tabs open explaining subatomic particles, string theory, the theory of everything (that's a fun one), general relativity, dark matter, dark energy, the mass of a black hole, you name it, I had the hardest time even writing the article because my thoughts were so far in the clouds (space clouds mind you, highly toxic).

I also understand how none of what I have written displays characteristics of scientific writing or plain English, and that I mostly ranted about stuff. I enjoy playing with language...coming up with odd ways to phrase things...breaking up my thoughts into small segments with ellipsis...

Thanks for reading!

*Special thanks to Psiopradio.com for the picture of the alien and universetoday.com for the picture of the black hole that I so eloquently combined to give you a completely realistic view of what's going on in space right now. Also a big thank you to SOPA for failing so I can post these pics without getting sued (I might still be able to get sued I don't know...that would be lame)