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Outer space: it\u2019s cold, it\u2019s dark, it\u2019s mostly empty. And it\u2019s occasionally very sweet.<\/p>\n
Astronomers peering into the heart of our galaxy have spotted traces of erythrulose, the same kind of sugar that\u2019s found in raspberries, kiwis, and other fruits, speckled in a giant gas cloud.<\/p>\n
The delectable discovery, detailed in a new study<\/a> published in the journal Nature Astronomy, is the first time sugar, a key ingredient for life, has been detected in interstellar space.<\/p>\n The detection \u201ctells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,\u201d study lead author Izaskun Jim\u00e9nez-Serra, an astrochemist at Spain\u2019s Centre for Astrobiology, told The Guardian<\/a>. \u201cIt opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar fashion to what it did on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Sugar\u2019s origins on Earth remain a mystery. Ribose and glucose have been found on asteroids<\/a>, and some scientists believe that, like water<\/a>, the compound was first brought here by wayward space rocks that crashed into our planet.<\/p>\n But where are these sugars forming in space? One likely culprit is molecular clouds, the dense regions of the gas and dust that make up the universe\u2019s interstellar medium. These clouds can act as a \u201cchemical factory,\u201d the researchers wrote, fusing disparate atoms together to form more complex substances, with more than 340 molecules having been detected in the interstellar medium so far.<\/p>\n To carry out their saccharine search, the researchers used two radio telescopes in Spain to peer into a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. Where earlier searches would have struggled to make sense of all the noise coming out of the highly dense region, theirs was \u2014 quite literally \u2014 laser-focused. Another team recently developed a way to recreate sugar\u2019s light signature in space when vaporized with a laser, Scientific American noted<\/a>, and this allowed them to narrow their focus.<\/p>\n What they found was unexpected. The cloud was swimming in erythrulose, which is made of four carbon atoms. But there were almost no signs of sugars made from three carbon atoms, SciAm explained, cutting against the prevailing belief that sugars gradually formed by adding one carbon atom at a time. This led the team to suspect that the four-carbon sugar was formed by two other organic molecules that each contain a carbon pair.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a major boon for astrobiology. Sugars like ribose and deoxyribose form the backbone of RNA and DNA. And erythrulose in particular can form ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA. In all, they estimated that up to 50 million tons of erythrulose could have rained down on Earth while life was still in its primordial age.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cTo have suffered this kind of rain of organics, I think that seems to have been a key step,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez-Serra told The Guardian. \u201cThat material could have contributed to prebiotic soups where the first biomolecules were synthesized.\u201d<\/p>\n