Space smells like a Nascar race—a mix of hot metal, diesel fumes, and barbecue.

INTERESTING FACT

Space smells like a Nascar race—a mix of hot metal, diesel fumes, and barbecue.

If you were ever able to use your sniffer in space, you'd discover that it smells like a mixture of hot metal, diesel fumes, and barbecue. That's all thanks to compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that emanate from dying stars. According to Louis Allamandola, the founder and director of the Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Lab at NASA Ames Research Center, the stinky molecules "seem to be all over the universe… And they float around forever," he told Popular Science.