Space booze: A party in the stars
Three words…INTERSTELLAR KEG PARTY!!!!!!!!!!!!
(searing blank stare) ……Yes! …common, don’t look at me like that, I’m serious.
Blank stares and chirping crickets aside, I will have you know that there’s alcohol in space. Wait…wait! Don’t go yet…ice cold booze!! Lots and lots and lots of it. Still don’t believe me? It so happens that thousands of light years from earth in constellations and molecular cloud formations very, very far away, there are massive clouds of alcohol.
In 1995, the gas cloud G34.3 was discovered. It contains excess alcohol to supply 300,000 pints (a pint = 473 ml) of beer to every single person on Earth for a billion years everyday, with a diameter 1,000 times the diameter of our entire Solar System. In another region known as W3(OH), a giant molecular cloud measuring half a trillion km across (300 billion miles) was discovered to be filled with alcohol. Sagittarius B2 also contains alcohol, billions upon billions of gallons floating in them.
Now that’s a lot of alcohol for one galaxy if you ask me. All that happy juice floating in space, enough to drown our own solar system; thinking what I’m thinking? Well for those of us thinking an interstellar pub crawl, it just so happens that these cloud is 58 quadrillion miles away. G34.3 and Sagittarius B2 which are located near the constellation Aquilla, are both 10,000 light years away, while W3(OH) is 6,500 light years away. Most of the content of the alcohol can kill you outright, as it contains mostly methanol which is more suitable for antifreeze and windshield washer fluid than for drinking and a cocktail of other compounds, some as nasty as carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia.
If one can look past that “small” hurdle, one can still get to asking the good Mr. Elon Musk to lend us his falcon heavy for a quick spin, I mean it’s only just for a few 10,000 light years. Of course, there’s still the problem of collecting the alcohol as it is in a gaseous state. But where there is a will, there is a way, plus we have some 10,000 years to figure it out. The good news is that there is also plenty ethanol (ethyl alcohol) in the mix to go around endlessly. Or we could wait for comet “Lovejoy” to come around in 8,000 light years. In 2015 when it came past earth, it was spewing the ethyl alcohol enough for 500 bottles of wine per second.
How it came to be
Now to the benevolent force behind this display of goodness, we have the big bang and the entire process of star formation to thank for making the universe awash with alcohol. Scientists theorize that as clouds of gas and dust collapse and heat up forming new stars, simpler compounds collect on bits of dust surrounding the star. When these compounds get close enough, they start to react with each other forming more complex molecules like alcohol. As the grains of dust carrying the alcohol travel near the young star, they get warmed up enough and the alcohol to separate, turning it into its gaseous state, thus creating the massive clouds of booze surrounding our young and very drunk star. These reactions can occur over a period of 10,000 years, how’s that for fermentation.
Another theory stipulates that a phenomenon known as "quantum tunneling" may account for how space is filled with booze. Space in general, is an environment with incomprehensibly frigid temperatures. This low-energy environ is inhospitable for complex organic molecules (like alcohol) in the first place. Popular science says the colder it gets, the slower the rates of chemical reactions, this is because there is less energy, leading to fewer collisions between molecules and less rearrangement of chemical bonds. Space being pretty cold, means that chemical reactions get slower as temperatures decrease, as there is less energy to get over the 'reaction barrier’. Scientists at the University of Leeds, explain that according to quantum mechanics, it is possible to cheat and dig through this barrier instead of going over it; quantum tunneling.
Carrying out an experiment, scientists recreated space's extreme cold in a laboratory (-210 degree Celsius) and observed a chemical reaction where Methanol was combined with an oxidizing chemical called the "hydroxyl radical." They were surprised to discover not only did this create boozy molecules (containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen), but the reaction occurred 50 times faster below-freezing simulation than it would at room temperature. All this could be also preparations for a very elaborate alien Oktoberfest, but you know, “science”. It was also discovered that Sagittarius B2 contains ethyl formate, an ester that gives raspberries their taste—and reportedly smells like rum.
Coincidence? I think not!
It’s quite possible the universe (aka aliens) on discovering humans to be horrible, made this booze impossible to both reach and collect. Quite sobering if you think of it.
The space between the stars,
Celestial bodies drift,
Beyond our deep blue skies,
Awash with alcohol.
Space is totally wasted,
The universe is drunk,
A party aliens started,
And us they didn’t invite.
In the immortal words of Mulder and Scully, the truth is out there.
References
There are Giant Clouds of Alcohol Floating in Space
Cosmic cloud contains enough alcohol to keep the whole world drinking for a billion years
Nasa discovers space rock releasing as much alcohol as 500 bottles of wine every second
Booze in space? The phenomenon that creates interstellar alcohol
Giant Cosmic Space Clouds of Beer