‘It’s not something you want to eat!’ The Milky Way is full of trillions of tonnes of dirty 'space grease’

Outer space may look full of wonder and beauty but a new study has found that it is utterly filthy.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Ege University in Turkey found that the Milky Way is actually stuffed full of dirty ‘space grease’.

This estimated amount of grease – or aliphatic carbon – floating around beyond the realms of our solar system is thought be as much as 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes.

To try and put that figure into some kind of everyday perspective, that is enough to fill up 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter, according to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Tim Schmidt, co-author of the study and professor at UNSW, told CNN: ‘Think of it more as like greasy soot.

‘It’s not a pure substance, it’s not biological. It’s random, it’s not something that you want to eat. It would make things dirty like soot would.’

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Professor Schmidt said that the grease was similar to organic matter that was found by the Curiosity rover on Mars earlier this month.

He added: ‘This kind of material is everywhere in the galaxy.’

The findings of the study will help scientists better understand the birth of stars and how life began.