Lovejoy Comet Found to Emit Alcohol, Sugar [Photos]

A comet is giving away free booze in outer space.

"Tipsy" comet Lovejoy has been discovered by NASA to be discharging copious amounts of ethyl alcohol and simple sugar (glycoaldehyde) in space that equates to store-bought, "Earthly" alcoholic beverage. "We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity," says lead author Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France. Biver and team's research paper was published October 23 in Science Advances.

The fascinating finding builds on previous discoveries about comets as a font for the emergence of life in the universe. Biver and colleagues' discovery is also, remarkably, the first time a form of "liquor" has been found in a comet in addition to the 21 different organic molecules they also detected, as told by NASA.

Since the comet Hale-Bopp was spotted in 1997, "C/2014 Q2" or Comet Lovejoy is regarded as "one of the brightest and most active comets," Eureka Alert notes. Last January 30, 2015, Comet Lovejoy was seen at its most proximal to the sun and was reported to be releasing 20 tons of water per second. Biver and team witnessed Lovejoy at that particular time and employed the use of a 30-meter diameter radio telescope in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Spain to further study it.

Last July marked a similar finding the European Space Agency came across with on Comet 67P/Churyumov­-Gerasimenko where 16 organic compounds were identified. ESA explains, as  per NASA, that the compounds detected aided the formation of amino acids, nucleobases, among many others. The Lovejoy discovery amplifies what researchers now believe about comets - that they somehow assisted the beginning of life in the universe.

"The result definitely promotes the idea the comets carry very complex chemistry," says co-author Stefanie Milam of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She furthers that when the Late Heavy Bombardment happened 3.8 billion years ago, life was not equipped with just simple molecules like water, carbon monoxide and nitrogen but "more sophisticated" elements. "We're finding molecules with multiple carbon atoms. So now you can see where sugars start forming, as well as more complex organics such as amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- or nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA. These can start forming much easier than beginning with molecules with only two or three atoms," she elaborates.

For co-author Dominique Bockelée-Morvan of the Paris Observatory, the next research opportunity is to find out whether the compounds found in comets were originally part of the "primordial cloud" that contributed to the formation of the solar system we know now or if it was developed much after.

Check out the Comet Lovejoy's official images here.