You never know what astronomers will turn up next. In the case of a stellar nursery in the heart of the galaxy, they found ethyl formate — the molecule that gives raspberries their flavor. Since it smells a bit like rum, it’s been called the “raspberry rum” molecule. B2 is a cloud of gas, dust, and young stars, about 400 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. It’s one of the biggest and busiest in the entire galaxy: It spans about 150 light-years, is eight million times the mass of the Sun, and has given birth to more than 30,000 stars. Most of the stars are small and faint, but a few are monsters — dozens of times the mass of the Sun. The entire cloud is filled with complex molecules. B2 contains just about every molecule seen anywhere outside our solar system; about half of them were discovered there. The list includes ethyl alcohol, formaldehyde, and a cyanide compound. Some of the molecules are among the chemical building blocks of amino acids, the building blocks of life. T
