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LLWeird Space Facts
Astronomers have discovered several massive clouds of alcohol in deep space. The most famous one is located in a region called Sagittarius B2, a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Here are a few "intoxicating" details about these space clouds:
1. It’s mostly Methanol and Ethanol
While the clouds do contain ethanol (the kind of alcohol we find in beer and wine), they are primarily made of methanol (wood alcohol), which is toxic to humans.
2. The Scale is Mind-Boggling
The cloud in Sagittarius B2 is estimated to contain enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. To put that in perspective, if you wanted to finish that much alcohol, everyone on Earth would have to drink 300,000 pints every second for a billion years.
3. How it Forms
These clouds aren't the result of a cosmic party. Alcohol molecules form when simple molecules like hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen cling to tiny grains of cosmic dust. Chemical reactions occur on the surface of these grains, eventually creating complex organic molecules like alcohol.
4. It Doesn't Smell Like a Bar
If you could take a "whiff" of the Sagittarius B2 cloud, it probably wouldn't smell like a cold beer. Because it also contains ethyl formate (the chemical that gives raspberries their flavor and rum its smell), scientists joke that the center of our galaxy likely smells like rum and raspberries.
@llporciuncula
