A long, wide bar of stars crosses the middle of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. And the center of the bar might be a good place for – well, a bar. A study published 50 years ago yesterday reported that a huge cloud near the galaxy’s heart contains vast amounts of ethyl alcohol – the form that people drink. Of course, it’s spread across tens of thousands of cubic light-years, so it might take a while to fill a frosty mug or a warm snifter.

Sagittarius B2 is about 27,000 light-years away. It contains enough gas and dust to make millions of stars the size of the Sun. The brew of material comprises many complex molecules, including several types of alcohol. Ethyl alcohol was the first to be discovered.

Alcohol consists of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, which are plentiful in the universe. In the cold of space, there’s not much energy to power the reactions that bind them together. But there’s a lot of space and a lot of time, so the level in the keg keeps rising.

The 1975 study concluded that the cloud contains two billion billion billion gallons of ethyl alcohol. As the study wryly noted: “This exceeds the total amount of all of man’s fermentation efforts since the beginning of recorded history.”

Sagittarius is low in the south-southeast before dawn. Its brighter stars form the outline of a teapot. Sagittarius B2 stands to the upper right of the spout – a good place to pour a cosmic brew.

Script by Damond Benningfield