There's alcohol up in space. No, it's not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it's in microscopic molecular form. Now researchers think they've discovered the largest alcohol molecule in space yet, in the form of propanol.
There's alcohol up in space. No, it's not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it's in microscopic molecular form.
These alcohol molecules have been found in what's known as a 'delivery room' of stars, the gigantic star-forming region called Sagittarius B2 . The region sits near the center of the Milky Way and close to Sagittarius A* , the supermassiveWhile this kind of molecular analysis of deep space has been happening for more than 15 years, the arrival of the telescope in Chile 10 years ago has stepped up the level of detail that astronomers can access.
from the University of Cologne in Germany."In a source like Sgr B2, there are so many molecules contributing to the observed radiation that their spectra overlap and it is difficult to disentangle their fingerprints and identify them individually." Finding molecules that are closely linked – like normal-propanol and iso-propanol – and measuring how abundant they are relative to each other, enables scientists to look in more detail at the chemical reactions that have produced them.