Researchers found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose in a cloud of gas and dust at the center of the Milky Way (Spitzer Space Telescope image shown here).Credit: NASA, Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC, Caltech) Call it an extra sweet discovery. Astronomers have detected a sugar molecule swirling within a cloud of gas and dust near the
Researchers found a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose in a cloud of gas and dust at the center of the Milky Way (Spitzer Space Telescope image shown here).Credit: NASA, Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC, Caltech)
Call it an extra sweet discovery. Astronomers have detected a sugar molecule swirling within a cloud of gas and dust near the center of our galaxy. They call the molecule (a compound with four carbon atoms called erythrulose) the first true sugar detected in “interstellar” space. The findings, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy1could help clarify how life began on Earth.
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“This is an incredibly exciting result,” says Brett McGuire, an astrochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Astronomers have been working for a long time to detect sugars in space.”
This is because they have already seen signs that the sugars on Earth that are essential for life originated in outer space. For example, the five-carbon sugar ribose was previously found in some billion-year-old meteorite samples.2,3suggesting that space rocks could have crashed into Earth and released this and other sugars.
In 2000, astronomers reported the detection of the two-carbon molecule glycolaldehyde (sometimes considered the simplest sugar molecule) in the interstellar space between stars.4. But while glycolaldehyde may act similarly to a sugar, “it’s not formally a sugar,” McGuire says. True sugars, he adds, must have a backbone of at least three carbon atoms. Since then, astronomers have continued to explore space in search of these larger molecules.
A surprise signature
Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astronomer at Spain’s National Scientific Council in Madrid, and her colleagues were in this group, but they had no luck while exploring the night sky. Then, in 2022, Emilio Cocinero, a physical chemist at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa, Spain, offered to share spectroscopic data of erythrulose, that is, the specific fingerprint of the wavelengths that the molecule emits.
Erythrulose has four carbons (gray). The red atoms are oxygens and the white atoms are hydrogens.Source: Ref. 1
“I said, ‘Okay, why don’t you send me the information and then I’ll check to see if we see it in our data,'” Jiménez-Serra says. At first she was skeptical. But to their surprise, erythrulose’s fingerprint appeared in the team’s observations of a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. And using the Spanish Yebes 40-meter and 30-meter IRAM radio telescopes for deeper observations, Jiménez-Serra and his team saw the signal even more clearly.
Raw material for life?
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