possibly in on corner of the picture there's a gang of little green piss artists all singing Barry Manilow songs and shoutin "I fuckin' luv you man" at passing satellites?

mass photo spec. same way we have determined the composition of the sun .other stars and nebulas

@glennlab ok but I go back to "how did it form" and now for good measure add "why does it not evaporate or catch fire"?

@FrayedBear Just like everything else in the known universe, in the hearts of stars. It is already a gas, so it can't evaporate and his held together much as rain clouds are held together on earth. It can't catch fire sine there is no oxidizer present in sufficent quantities to ignite it and no ignition source.

They are not sure if the alcohol molecules were attached to cosmic dust and got excited off them or if it was combined with water ice and evaporated when the ice was bombarded with cosmic rays. The betting is on the ice theory.

@glennlab So why can the method not be replicated to produce booze here? And why have alcohol eating critters not developed to live off the stuff? Here they're called humans.

@FrayedBear We have a better method of poducing alcohol in much less time and much less energy consumption. Better to drink yeast piss in 4 days than wait 1000 years for it to form in space.

@glennlab What about that vintage though. Surely it must add to the flavour?

You plan on coming home before we're done?

And lived to tell the tale?