As that gaseous oxygen cooled and mixed with the surrounding hydrogen left by supernovae, water could have formed in a gaseous state - as vapor

Water was present just a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang, according to a new study, shaking up the timeline of planetary evolution.

Water is an essential part of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere – and now it we know it may have formed not long after the start of the universe

A team of astrophysicists running numerical simulations believe that water may have existed a lot earlier in the universe than we thought. According to the new study, the life-giving compound may have pre-dated even the first galaxies.

This discovery suggests water could have shaped the first galaxies and planets, changing how we understand the universe’s history.

The early universe, fresh from the Big Bang, was a hot, dense soup of simple elements: hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium. But within a cosmic blink—just 100 to 200 million years after the birth of the universe—water began to form.