(License: Public Domain]: Pixabay
Wow! Fellow steemians, this is amazing! How is this possible you would ask. Science answers it all. I think it time for the lovers of alcohol to go to space for there is a lot of alcohol waiting to be consumed. Imagine, our astronauts might even stop over for a chill while on a space cruise.
(License: Public Domain]: Superior wallpapers
Perharps, i'll have to setup a company in space where i can package the alcohol down to those who would love to have a taste of natural alcohol. Jokes apart, How did we come about this scientific discovery?
Ten thousand light years from earth in a constellation far, far away, there is massive cloud of alcohol. It鈥檚 space booze.
Discovered in 1995 near the constellation Aquila, the cloud is 1000 times larger than the diameter of our solar system. It contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. To down that much alcohol, every person on earth would have to drink 300,000 pints each day鈥攆or one billion years.(Lucas, 2013)
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The Sagittarius B2 cloud has ten billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol floating in it. Most of it is undrinkable, but there are some of them are ethanol, which is drinkable by humans. Scientists still don't know for sure why the booze is out there, but they have a theory.
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 honeys. These are complex molecules, and they need to be painstakingly formed by living things. So what are billions of gallons of it doing out in space? The Sagittarius B2 cloud is filled with billions of liters of alcohol. Some of it is methanol, the kind of thing we'd use as antifreeze, and made by simpler processes than drinking alcohol. This is the stuff that has to be boiled off when bootlegging alcohol, and during Prohibition the fact that many bootleggers either didn't know or didn't care what they were doing resulted in more than a few deaths. Some of the space-cohol is vinyl alcohol, which is also undrinkable. Some, however, is ethanol, or drinking alcohol. How did such complex molecules form in vast quantities in outer space?
Heavy atoms come from fusion in the stars. Let a big star live long enough and it can form massive quantities of very heavy atoms before blowing them across the universe in a nova. Forming the complex molecules that are alcohols is a different matter. A molecule or two might be formed by the random interactions of floating atoms in space, but not billions of gallons in large chunks.
Scientists considered 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.
Most of the ethanol out there is in gas clouds, so it's still easier to get a drink at home. It's still amazing the kind of stuff that can be formed out in space, simply because of the nearly limitless possible ways for simple molecules to get together while being put through freezing temperatures, boiling heat, and the tiny motes of dust that fly in the void.(Inglis, 2012)
REFERENCES
Inglis, E. (2012). How alcohol is formed naturally in space. https://doi.org/5911365
Lucas, R. (2013). There are Giant Clouds of Alcohol Floating in Space Mental Floss. https://doi.org/51271
