Alcohol in the Galaxy's Ice: What the Center of the Milky Way Hides express
At the center of our Galaxy lies a dense forest of dust and gas. Starlight barely penetrates this thicket, like a flashlight in fog. But it is precisely there, in this dense cloud, that new stars are born.
Scientists decided to look into this fog. They took light from 15 bright stars that shine through cold clouds. The ice on dust grains in these clouds leaves its imprint on the light, like fingerprints. From these imprints, one can tell what the ice is made of.
It turned out that in the Galactic center, the ice is poor in methanol — a simple alcohol. In other parts of the Milky Way, there is more of it. Why? Possibly, young stars here are so hot that they evaporate methanol from their outskirts, just as the sun dries up puddles after rain.
This discovery helps understand how planets are born. After all, comets and planets are assembled from such icy dust grains. If the ices in the Galactic center are different, then planets there might be different too.
In space, more than 200 different molecules have been found, and methanol is one of the most common. In warm clouds, it forms more complex organic substances, the building blocks of life.