It's not a joke. The feat is carried out by an international team led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB). They first detected sugar in the interstellar medium, the region of space located between stars within a galaxy. Finding sugar in a galaxy is no small feat.
Specifically, it is erythrulose. On Earth it is found in raspberries and other red fruits or as an additive in tanning cosmetics. In space, it was found in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. The results are in Nature Astronomy.
sweet find
They suggest that sugars could have reached the early Earth from space about 4 billion years ago. They contributed to the synthesis of the first nucleic acids and, therefore, to give rise to the first forms of life. A sugar had never been detected in the interstellar medium.
"Our work shows that sugars can form naturally in space," they explain. Monosaccharides or simple sugars are divided into two large families: ketoses and aldoses. Erythrulose is the only ketose that has four carbon atoms.
The discovery of sugar in a galaxy was thanks to ultrasensitive and broadband spectroscopic scans. They used the 40-meter diameter radio telescope at the Yebes Observatory (Guadalajara) and the 30-meter diameter radio telescope at the Institute of Millimeter Radio Astronomy (IRAM), in Pico Veleta (Granada).
From the amount of erythrulose measured in that stellar cloud, calculations were made. It is estimated that between 0.5 and 50 million tons of this sugar could have reached the Earth's surface during the Late Heavy Bombardment. It was when our planet experienced the impact of meteorites and comets between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago.
bringing life
The presence of erythrulose in interstellar space provides an alternative source of sugars. There life could have taken its first steps to obtain energy (metabolic processes) and multiply (replicative processes).
«The detection of erythrulose in a molecular cloud is an exciting discovery. It opens the possibility of identifying larger sugars, such as ribose, in the interstellar medium. This is part of the RNA. And also other molecules relevant to the origin of life," they say.
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