The Milky Way is full of toxic and sticky fat

Space: It's dark, cold and, in most parts of the galaxy, probably pretty sticky.

Swirling in the dust, soot and electromagnetic radiation of the Milky Way, there is also a pile of toxic grease. This "space fat" – actually an oily form of hydrogen-bonded carbon called aliphatic carbon – is one of many types of carbon dumped into empty space by flaming stars and can be among the key ingredients of the formation of new stars and planets. say the astronomers.

How much fat is there to lubricate the Milky Way? Scientists do not know for sure, but a new document published June 13 in the Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices magazine offers an answer: enough fat to really mess up the windshield of your spaceship. [Interstellar Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecrafts to Explore the Cosmos]

According to a team of astronomers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and from the Ege University in Turkey, there can be five times as much spatial fat penetrating the Milky Way than the previous estimates. By creating a fat-space proxy in their lab and comparing its composition to previous observations of the galaxy, the researchers discovered that there could be about 11 trillion trillion tons of fatty carbon molecules in our galaxy – The equivalent of 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter

"This space fat is not the kind of thing that we would want to spread on a slice of toast" Tim Schmidt, a professor of chemistry at UNSW, said in a statement. "It's dirty, probably toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space – and our laboratory." (Schmidt added that the solar wind probably prevents this grease from erasing our own solar system.)

In their new study, Schmidt and his colleagues looked closely at the space greases by doing some of them. To mimic the process by which stars synthesize gases and project them into the interstellar medium (that is what astronomers call the substance between stars), the team has developed a carbon-rich plasma, or ionized gas, in a vacuum chamber. From this plasma appeared a byproduct of interstellar dust where the space grease spreads.

Using spectroscopy, the team determined how the greasy dust absorbed certain wavelengths of infrared light, which would affect its presence. . With this data, the team could then turn to previous observations of nearby stars to determine "how much fatty carbon is in the line of sight of the different stars," Schmidt told The Guardian

. are about 100 space grease atoms for 1 million hydrogen atoms – representing between one quarter and one half of the interstellar carbon in the galaxy.

This knowledge of space fat could help scientists better understand our entire galaxy, the researchers wrote. . Carbon is considered an essential element of life, so knowing how much carbon is available in different forms in the interstellar medium could give scientists an idea of ​​the likelihood that other life-carrying solar systems might form ( or to form) the Milky Way. For Schmidt, the results of this study are a source of optimism

"It is intriguing that organic materials of this type – materials incorporated in planetary systems – are so abundant," said Schmidt

. on live science.