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FORGET the Restaurant at the End of the Universe—the Bar at the Centre of the Galaxy is where it's at. At a conservative estimate, the gas cloud Sagittarius B2 contains 1027 (that's a billion billion billion) litres of alcohol at 200 per cent proof. Sadly, though, the alcohol is smeared throughout an enormous region of space in the form of a super-tenuous gas. To get enough to fill a whisky glass, you'd need to trawl a volume as big as the Earth itself.

Sagittarius B2 is a vast cloud 150 light years across lying within 400 light years of the giant black hole that lurks in the dark heart of the Milky Way. It is one of the biggest of the molecular clouds that account, collectively, for about 10 per cent of our Galaxy's visible mass. And it's a sobering (or not so sobering) thought that there is considerably more ...

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