A sugar found in raspberries and used in fake tan lotion has turned up in a huge cloud of dust and gas near the heart of the Milky Way, according to the Guardian. The compound, erythrulose, is the first sugar ever detected in interstellar space.
Dr Izaskun Jiménez-Serra of Spain's Centre for Astrobiology aimed two radio telescopes at a cloud with the unlovely name G+0.693-0.027. A hunt for simpler three-carbon sugars came up empty, so she wasn't hopeful — then the signature of erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, appeared. "To my surprise, I saw the signals," she said. It builds up when two common cosmic compounds react on dust grains, even at a frigid -250C.
Sugars like erythrulose can form ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, which probably carried life's earliest genetic code. Writing in Nature Astronomy, the team estimates millions of tonnes may have rained onto the young Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment, seeding the soups where the first biomolecules formed.
Previously:
• Interstellar sugar cloud: not Atkins-compliant
• NASA reveals asteroid sample contains building blocks of life
• All five DNA/RNA building blocks found in asteroid Ryugu samples
