The Milky Way Has A Very Surprising Smell And Taste
One of the wonderful things about living on this planet is that there is an abundance of different smells and tastes to absorb. From fresh-cut grass to the smell of the ocean during the summer to pizza baking in the oven, our noses delight in taking them in. They can trigger memories of simpler times. The same can be said of when the taste of food hits our taste buds and makes us crave more — though there may be times we want to spit it out. Those are (usually) earthly delights. But what if we were able to taste and smell things from other planets or even the dust of things like the Milky Way galaxy.
Sadly, our home galaxy does not smell or taste anything like the yummy candy bar (this is one person's opinion here) of the same name. There is no hint of chocolate or caramel in the air there, and if you could breathe in or ingest some of the particles, it would taste nothing like that. But how do scientists know what we would encounter?
The Milky Way does not taste like pizza
Scientists have figured out what the Milky Way galaxy would smell or taste like, if we had the capability to go out there and sample things. They looked at the chemical structure of Sagittarius B2, which is a gas cloud at the center of the galaxy, via a radio telescope. Their findings were that there is the presence of ethyl formate. This comes from ethanol, and star clouds are usually full of these molecules, per Smithsonian Magazine. The presence of this gave them a clue what it might smell and taste like — rum and raspberries — via The Guardian.
There is another obstacle that would keep us from being able to tell for ourselves. Aside from the whole space travel and also surviving in space things, there are not enough actual molecules for us to ingest. Our atmosphere has 25 million trillion molecules per cubic centimeter, according to the Galveston Daily News, which is ... a lot. Sagittarius B2 has like 3,000 per cubic centimeter, which is negligible, per Astronomy and Astrophysics. So, if you want to sample what it would be like, just go open a bottle of rum and sniff or eat a raspberry. Then you can picture yourself out in the Milky Way galaxy.