The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and booze. In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages. It contains enough alcohol to supply every person on the planet with 300,000 pints of beer per day for the next billion years! If bottled at the source, the proof for this beer would be very low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%, but as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.