The smells of space: horse pee and raspberries
Space might seem like vast nothingness, but it鈥檚 actually full of stuff 鈥� and that stuff smells.
Take comet 67p for example, which is hurtling through the skies at a cracking pace. Thanks to information collected by ROSINA (the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis instrument), we know that there are some pretty pungent aromas coming from the comet鈥檚 coma鈥攖he cloud around its core.
If you were to get a whiff of it, you鈥檇 smell a mixture of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulphide), horse pee (ammonia), almond (hydrogen cyanide) formaldehyde and marzipan. If you have a sensitive nose, you鈥檇 also note tangs of vinegar (sulphur dioxide) and the sweeter carbon disulphide.
European Space Agency scientists think that as the comet gets closer to the sun, the makeup of the chemicals released will change. If this occurs, it will give us additional information about the chemical composition of the 67p.
This is exciting because comets are leftovers of the solar system鈥檚 beginnings more than 4.6 billion years ago. The more we know about 67p鈥檚 composition, the more we can learn about the formation of the solar system and how it has changed over time.
And what about Sagittarius B2, that colossal molecular cloud of gas and dust located 390 light years from the centre of the Milky Way? It hit the headlines a few years ago not because of its mass (which is several million times that of our sun), or even its density (up to 40 times denser than a normal molecular cloud). No, we Earthlings were fascinated because according to scientists, it smells like two of our favourite things: raspberries and rum.
After all the rotten egg smells apparently in the universe, it鈥檚 nice to know there鈥檚 at least something that might be worth inhaling (though only in theory鈥攊n reality, you鈥檇 die). Sagittarius B2 contains huge amounts of ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for giving raspberries their flavour. And if raspberries aren鈥檛 enough it has another unique trait鈥攊t also smells of rum.
The unique scents of Sagittarius B2 were discovered by astronomers who have been analysing the cloud in the hope of finding amino acids鈥攌nown as the building blocks of life. While they haven鈥檛 found any yet, they believe it鈥檚 just a matter of time. But if one day you do happen to be travelling past Sagittarius B2 don鈥檛 be tempted to take off your space helmet and have a whiff鈥攔esearchers also detected evidence of propyl cyanide鈥攁 lethal chemical you definitely don鈥檛 want to inhale.