The Weird Way Alcohol Behaves In Space
Interstellar Dust NASA Quantum tunneling holds a clue for one of the great mysteries of space chemistry. A few years back, scientists discovered a giant cloud of hooch floating around in space. The 288 billion-mile cloud of gaseous methanol, an alcohol present in antifreeze and some moonshine presented a conundrum: How do alcohols, which are fairly complex organic molecules, form in space? In the vast expanse of interstellar space, temperatures are so low that chemical reactions shouldn't be able to occur, following the classic rules of chemistry--there's just not enough energy. Yet they do occur, and with an even faster reaction rate than at room temperature, according to a study online in Nature Chemistry this week. These impossible reactions can be explained through a phenomenon called quantum tunneling, the authors theorize. As temperatures plummet, chemical reactions slow down, as there is less energy and fewer collisions between molecules to rearrange...