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Can we make beer out of the molecules in space? |
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Can the main chemicals of beer be found in space?
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The best place to look for beer ingredients in space is where stars form in our galaxy
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For millennia, people have gazed at the stars and wondered what place there is for humans in the universe. It is perhaps not coincidental that people have imbibed beer for millennia as well. How many centuries were spent trying to understand our place under the stars whilst under the influence?
Now that we stand on the verge of space exploration, not with our minds, but with our bodies, it is time to bring together our best understanding of interstellar chemistry and our love of beer to ask: can we make beer out of the complex molecules in space? Dr Andrew Walsh from the University of NSW's School of Physics ponders this important question…
Let's start with beer, which has four main ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever be able to find such ingredients out in space. I am not holding hopes of discovering space fields of barley! So we need an alternative approach to making beer in space.
Let's look at the molecules that go into beer and see if we can find them in space. (I'll gloss over the difficult but essential work of how to gather such molecules, separate them out and combine in a way that will bring joy to the palette. I leave this for future generations of beer and space enthusiasts.)
So, what is beer made of?
1. Water - makes up 90-95 per cent of total beer volume
2. Alcohols - in particular ethanol, methanol and higher alcohols, which add a little flavour but are mainly there as intoxicants
3. Carbon dioxide - beer's bubbles
4. Sugars/starches - from malted barley. The most important sugar in beer is glucose, which acts as building block for more complex sugars and starches
5. Proteins - contribute to the body of the beer
6. Esters - lend beer its fruity smell
7. Iso-alpha acids - compounds from the hops which create the bitterness in beer, and add some preservative properties.
It turns out that the best place to look for these ingredients is where stars form in our galaxy.
Complex molecules need warm, dense regions to flourish, and it is this stage where the young star is heating its surroundings (but not yet blasted them away), that best suits the needs of these chemicals.
At this stage, the chemicals exist in a 'pre-star formation soup', usually as quite simple chemicals.
But they aren't the stuff you want to make beer out of - the chemicals include ammonia, hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg gas) and methane (fart gas). However, all is not lost because in this pre-star formation soup we find abundant quantities of water and carbon dioxide. So at least we can make soda water!
When things heat up, the chemistry gets more interesting and more complex molecules become abundant. We have detected nearly 150 molecules in space, and while most consist of only a few atoms, some get quite complex. The current record held by a molecule is 13 atoms! Of these space molecules, about 18 are also found in beer.
So in space we've found:
1. Plenty of water - a single star forming region contains enough water to fill four Jupiter-sized planets
2. Alcohols - methanol and ethanol
3. Plenty of carbon dioxide
4. Sugars/Starches - no one has seen glucose in space yet, but the simplest sugar, glycoaldehyde, has been detected
5. Proteins - we haven't found any yet, because proteins are too complex for us to be able to detect
6. Esters - same story as proteins
7. Bittering compounds - again, no, but there maybe a chance.
So can we make beer out of the molecules we see in space? I will have to answer 'not yet'. But things do certainly look promising.
We see most of the important chemicals in beer. And there are good reasons to suppose that most of the remaining chemicals are out in space, it's just that we haven't been able to detect them yet.
It would be nice to see a complete inventory of molecules in space so that future generations can look forward to the time when they'll be amongst the stars. Such a situation needs vision - from governments and from astronomers to spend more money and time on these important molecules, so that one day we may be able to drink beer in space!
This article is based on a talk given by Dr Andrew Walsh at University of NSW in October 2006.
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If we want to make beer in space, ethanol scarcity means it would be the first thing we run out of. However, we can calculate how much beer can be made from a star forming region. If we made a beer of five per cent alcoholic strength and divided it up so every Earth inhabitant got an equal share, we'd all get about twenty times the volume of Sydney Harbour.
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