Raspberries and Rum - The Flavors of Our Universe?

Yesterday I was scrolling through the old Instagram feed when a strange post from UberFacts came across my screen. UberFacts is a great account on Instagram that does exactly what the name would suggest: they post facts. Sometimes they post facts that are quirky or fun, and sometimes they just post facts that are relevant to the times. The post that caught my attention was this one: 

So, naturally my first thought was, "how on Earth do they know this? No one has been there, and they certainly haven't taken their helmets off to smell and taste whatever is there." Well, apparently this is a bit of an exaggerated fact. This is all based on the presence of something called ethyl formate. This compound is what gives raspberries their flavor and apparently it also smells like rum.

Don't get too excited though. Here's why it's exaggerated. They found a bunch of other compounds and molecules in this sample of electromagnetic radiation, so it's not like there are just bottles of rum and raspberries floating around up there. What they looked at is just a giant dust cloud and ethyl formate is just one compound that they found in there. 

So yes, technically it is theoretically possible that the center of the galaxy could smell like rum because of this compound. That is assuming every other molecule that is present is odorless and tasteless. A more appropriate title for this fact, and every article that has benefitted from this headline since the publication of the data, would be "Compound that gives raspberries their taste found in massive space cloud". Yeah, I can see why they went with the one they did.