What does space taste like

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Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. Fortnite Game of Thrones Books. Comics Music. Why does space taste like a raspberry cocktail? In this essay, explore how the sensory aspects of food — taste and smell, in particular — ground our knowledge of the phenomenon of space. Space is impossible — the ultimate how is this for real. The scale alone is absurd. Earth exists in the Milky Way galaxy, which measures an astounding hundred thousand light-years across.

Less than a century ago, it was believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe. The known universe is in fact comprised of billions of galaxies, some of which are ten times the size of the Milky Way.

Within those galaxies are millions, billions, sometimes even trillions of stars there are probably a hundred billion billion stars in the entire universe , as well as gas and dust. The Big Bang theory states that this whole insane thing began with one tiny particle. That tiny particle exploded more than 13 billion years ago, precipitating the expansion of space, an expansion that is still going on today. The universe is just getting bigger and bigger.

All sorts of trippy stuff happens in space. Like this: Because light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us here on Earth, we see these galaxies not in their current state, but as they were when the light first started its transuniversal voyage.

As I learned or relearned, rather — this is certainly something we were all taught in high school physics class on a recent visit to the American Museum of Natural History, "The farther out in space we look, the further back in time we see. Which is all to say, space is one big WTF: so big, so old, so unknown.

I get sent into an existential tailspin when I think about it long enough. Almost too much. But the thing that grounds space for me, and for many others, is that thing that unites us all: food. In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum. The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star. Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies depending on the type of molecule.

While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud.