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Milky Way Smells like Rum & Tastes like a raspberry
Not long ago, I heard that the heart of the Milky Way smelled like rum and tasted like raspberry.
Some things in life are too ridiculous to ignore - and this is definitely one of them!
I did a bit of research on this ridiculous claim and here's what I found out ...
A swirling ball of dust and gas
At the center of the Milky Way galaxy is a giant, swirling sphere of dust and gas called Sagittarius B2.
Sagittarius B2 has a mass 3 million times the mass of the sun, and it spans an area about 150 light years.
For years, scientists and astronomers have been studying this dust cloud to try and identify amino acids, also known as the building blocks of life.
Finding amino acids here would be a huge discovery, because it will exponentially increase the chances of survival on other planets as these molecules are "sown" on the worlds.
For years, scientists in Spain have trained their 30m IRAM radio telescopes over the central gas cloud of the Milky Way to try and identify some of these amino acids.
However, when analyzing the stream of data collected by their device, the scientists discovered the presence of a substance called ethyl formate.
It is this chemical compound that gives raspberries its distinctive and sharp flavor, along with the characteristic aroma of rum.
In terms of beer ...
Sagittarius B2 actually contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion, trillion pints of beer.
That means to consume all of the alcohol in Sagittarius B2, every person on Earth would have to drink 300,000 liters of beer a day for a billion years!
So you've got it, mankind will drink beer until the end of the time to cross Sagittarius B2.
And now we know that our cosmic center smells like rum and tastes like raspberry.
Yeah Science!
