Astronomers have made a sweet discovery, detecting a type of sugar in space that is also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, was found in the interstellar medium, thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.
Understanding Sugar in Space
Sugar does more than just sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties of sugar fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are eager to know how sugars form because they are a key ingredient for life as we know it.
Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. This is the latest kind of sugar detected in space, in a region crossed by NASA’s twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.
The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Scientists have found interesting chemistry in our galaxy, including building blocks for genetic material and parts of the cell. They spotted a cousin to table sugar near the center of the Milky Way about 25 years ago, and black grains from asteroid Bennu retrieved by NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft yielded other sugars, including a key DNA ingredient.
Implications for Life
The latest sugar isn’t essential for life, but can easily convert to a form that’s thought to be crucial to kick-starting life on Earth. And it’s one of the most complex sugars spotted so far, said astrophysicist Erika Hamden with the University of Arizona. These interstellar investigations are all about understanding how life got started.
Did faraway comets or space rocks deliver the essential ingredients to us? Or were the essential components already here that eventually gave rise to our solar system? The new sugar lends evidence to the latter theory. Researchers want to look for more sugars in space and learn about how they convert to different forms.
Original reporting: NBC4 Los Angeles — read the source article.
