What is the smell of space? It is trying to find out the astronomers who make perfumes

After a long career of designer perfume, Marina Barsanilla decided to convert her nose into the universe.

Sugandha designer enrolled in the university in 2015, which was to study planetary science. She was taking classes in estrochemistry – chemical makeup of outskirts – when she realized that she could marry her two passion.

“Whenever I see something new, the first question is: I wonder what it smells,” he said As it happens Host Nil Koxle.

“One day I thought: In fact, this molecule I am studying? I have it in my perfume lab. And this smell that I am imagining? I can really make it.”

Barcanilla is now an astronomy doctoral researcher at Westminster University in London, England. When she is not discovering the viability of life on Mars, she is re -smelling of space, from the sulfuric smell of the deepest clouds of Jupiter, in the center of Milky Way, re -smell of space.

Four of the stallers are now available for public sniffing in the London Natural History Museum, which are part of the ongoing performance: Space: Can life be present beyond Earth?

‘Antiseptic,’ but also like gunpowder?

So what is the smell of space like?

“I don’t think it is generally very good fragrance,” said Barcanilla.

Those people may know. Returning from International Space Station, Canadian astronaut Julie Penett, Told CBC News in 2009 The location smells “cold” and “antiseptic”.

He said, “I opened the hatch after six hours of the space walk. The entire airlock area came in contact with the vacuum of the space for all those hours. So when I opened the door, I was smelled as to what was an antiseptic smell,” he said.

“It was not detergent, but it was definitely like a hospital-smell type and I thought, ‘Wow, it is the smell of space.” As much as I thought about it, I thought: ‘Wow, this is what is not smelling, because there is probably nothing left, a single micro -organism or nothing.’

Meanwhile, Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield described it differently, given in 2013 that he and many others report “burnt steak and gunpowder” in the airlock.

“Absolutely not a spring garden,” He said in a Canadian space agency video,

Barcanilla says that when it comes to the smell of space, it really depends on that, in particular, you mean.

“Most space is quite empty and … it’s not really smelling,” he said. “But this happens when you go to specific planets or moons, or when you go on a molecular cloud, where we find high concentrations of various gases and micro dust, we can then find molecules and chemical compounds that have smell.”

Barcanilla says that in 2017, it has created 25 smells since it worked.

For the museum exhibition, he killed the smell of Mars, which is his scientific feature; Titan, a large moon revolves around the planet Saturn; Bennu, an asteroid; And as Earth it was about 3.5–4 billion years ago, when life was just starting.

“The initial earth is slightly smelly. It is a combination of a slight type of wet odor, such as what you get when it rains, but also with the smell that you get from various microbial strains,” she said.

“One of the smell you get is a kind of sulfry is the smell of cabbage that also goes there. So it is a bit smelly.”

She admits that no composition of her can be done, per.

“In space, you cannot smell so it is always impossible. We do not have the wind that we can breathe, so it is completely out of the question,” he said. “But what I am trying to do is to rebuild the chemistry that we find at various places in space.”

‘The more it smells, the more people like to smell it’

Barcanilla has smelled its place in schools to teach children, and has also got a chance to see people interacting with people in the museum.

“I always thought that people are a little afraid of smelly items, but no, they are the best,” he said. “The more it smells, the more people like to smell it and the more they laugh and the more questions they ask about it.”

Tigoring that curiosity, she says, the whole thing.

“It’s about bringing close space to the Earth, and it is for people to open their minds and understand that whatever we have in space has also ended here on Earth,” he said.

As the final frontier may look foreigner, Barcanila says that there is nothing that is really unfamiliar, from at least a olfactory perspective.

Internal clouds of Jupiter? Barcanilla tells BBC News They are full of ammonia and sulfur, something that you can find in fertilizer, and which smells like rotten eggs.

Very center of our galaxy? You will get an ethyl format, which is usually found in fruit, and which probably smells, best, Like rumAnd the worst, like nail polish remover.

“We are part of the whole of great universe,” said Barconila. “The saying is that we go all around that we are all stardust, and this is true. Everything we are making, everything that we smell on earth here, originally come from space.”