Alcohol in space?
No, we are not talking about celebrating astronauts or drunken aliens, although this would explain all that probing. No there is an interstellar gas cloud, Sagittarius B that contains an estimated billion, billion, billion litres of alcohol.
In order to get a drink on Earth, we need biological organisms. We need something capable of producing some kind of sugar, like fruits or honey – complex molecules that need to be meticulously formed by living things.
So what are billions of gallons of it doing out in space?
How did such complex molecules form in vast quantities in outer space?
Was there a giant alien moonshine still that exploded?
All jokes aside scientists reckoned that some molecules might gather on bits of dust floating in the vacuum of space.
The surface of the dust might let these molecules interact and form alcohol. Fast-moving molecules might then blow the alcohol off the dust, leaving gallons of it in space. However, there wasn’t any conceivable way to peel the alcohol molecule off the dust without destroying the structure of the molecule in space.
Now scientists think that ice could form on the dust, trapping the alcohol. As the ice melts and evaporates, when the dust bit drifts near new star clusters, the alcohol is gently freed without getting destroyed.
Stay Curious C.Costigan
