If this doesn't get us funding, nothing will.
Situated a mere 10,000 lightyears from Earth is a mass of potential booze going to waste.
And it's 1000 times larger than the diameter of the entire solar system.
Meaning there's enough alcohol to 400 trillion-trillion pints of beer.
To drink that much hooch, every person on Earth - man, woman, child and everything else - would need to drink 300,000 pints per day.
The cloud was found in 1995 and sadly, if you're planning a full-send, it's 58 quadrillion miles away with an alcohol content of less than one per cent. Plus it's not all social lubricant. A lot of the compounds in the cloud are noxious gases like carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia.
Image: Color-composite image of the Galactic center and Sagittarius B2 as seen by the ATLASGAL survey. Credit: NASA
A second alcohol soaked booze cloud sits in the Sagittarius B2 Cloud as seen above. This fella is home to 10 billion-billion-billion litres of booze and yet most of it is undrinkable.
The cloud holds a majority of ethanol, the same stuff you'll find in antifreeze and windshield washer fluid. Which is great if you're a sales rep for Super Cheap.
In a similar case, at the near-centre of our Milky Way lies a modest stretch of gaseous instant courage over 463 billion kilometres wide. Not the remnants of an inner-galaxy pisser, the bands of alcohol form as baby stars emerge from the collapse of gas and dust. Ethyl alcohol commonly attaches to particles of floating dust and as the dust moves towards the gravity of the new star, it heats and becomes gas.
And it's in that process that there's a true use for these alcohol clouds.
The process can inform us about how our biggest stars form.
And not to mention that alcohol is an organic compound and can be a precursor or sign of life.
According to Barry Turner at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, these alcohol clouds may “help us better understand how life might arise elsewhere in the cosmos.”
So where there's alcohol, there's life.
Sounds like the Australian outback.
But there's just one more tidbit that must be explored: what does it taste like?
Well, Sagittarius B2 contains ethyl formate, an ester that helps give raspberries their taste—and reportedly smells like rum. By that logic, the center of our galaxy may taste and smell like raspberry-flavored rum.
Scientists haven’t found if it pairs well with moon cheese.
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