The space between stars has yielded a surprising find: a type of sugar that also shows up in raspberries and self-tanners.
Astronomers have identified the sugar, known as erythrulose, floating in what scientists call the interstellar medium — the thin layers of gas and dust that exist between stars. The discovery adds to growing evidence that the building blocks of life may be scattered throughout the galaxy.
Sugar isn’t just for sweetening food. Different types of sugar power our cells and even form part of the structure of DNA. That’s why scientists are so eager to understand how sugars form in space — because they’re considered a fundamental ingredient for life as we know it.
Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes located in Spain, a team of researchers gathered data from a large cloud of gas near the center of the Milky Way. They confirmed the presence of erythrulose in gas form by comparing the telescope readings to sugar samples tested in a laboratory. The region where the sugar was found is one that NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft — the most distant human-made objects ever launched from Earth — have crossed.
The findings appeared Monday in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
This isn’t the first time astronomers have come across interesting chemistry in our galaxy. About 25 years ago, scientists spotted a close relative of ordinary table sugar near the Milky Way’s center. More recently, dark grains retrieved from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission contained other sugars, including one considered a key ingredient for DNA.
While erythrulose itself isn’t essential for life, it can readily transform into a form that scientists believe played a critical role in sparking life on Earth. It’s also among the most complex sugars detected in space so far, according to astrophysicist Erika Hamden of the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study.
Hamden described it as “a pristine example of the stuff that’s just floating out in the galaxy.”
The bigger question driving these investigations is whether life’s essential ingredients arrived on Earth via comets or asteroids from deep space — or whether those components were already present in the material that eventually formed our solar system.
The newly detected sugar supports the idea that the ingredients were already here. Researchers are now hoping to find additional sugars in space and better understand how they transform from one form to another.
Locating erythrulose in one part of the galaxy suggests similar molecules could be hiding in other distant regions as well, said study author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain.
“The key ingredients for the origin of life could be present in other regions across the galaxy, opening the possibility for life to develop elsewhere in the universe,” Jiménez-Serra said.
