Alchohol in space
Some people will go to any lengths to get a drink, but roughly 6000 light years to a giant cloud of alcohol
might be a little more than even the most avid drinker can manage. This cloud of methyl alchol is 463 billion kilometres across, but is unfortunately not suitable for human consumption, as the article is careful to point out, lest people get any ideas and nipping out after work.
Despite the great publicity, this work is actually quite serious - by detecting the emissions from clouds of hydrocarbons like this, astronomers have been able to get good estimates for distances in our galaxy. Furthermore, these kind of chemicals - carbons and hydrogens in molecules - are part of the basic building blocks of biology as we know it, and previously it wasn’t believed that such molecules could form or survive in space, due to the hard radiation out there. So this raises some interesting questions about life on Earth, and other planets - could life have been seeded by molecules such as these from the interstellar medium (the gas from which stars form)?
That, and it just makes for a really cool story! 