Comets smell like rotten eggs, horse urine

The smell of comets is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulphide), of horse stable (ammonia) and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde, it has been revealed.

The Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis has been sniffing the fumes of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko with its two mass spectrometers.

The smell is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide and adding some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulphur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulphide will bring the perfume of comets.

Kathrin Altwegg from the Center of Space and Habitability (CSH) of the University of Bern, said that this all made a scientifically enormously interesting mixture in order to study the origin of their solar system material, the formation of Earth and the origin of life.