Astronomers find sugar in space found in raspberries: “Just floating in the galaxy”

The space between the stars just got a little more interesting.

Astronomers have discovered a form of sugar in the atmosphere found in raspberries and tuna. The sugar, called erythrulose, hides in the so-called interstellar medium: the thin clouds of gas and dust that fill the interstellar space.

Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powdered donuts. Different species fuel our cells and make up our DNA. Scientists are eager to know how sugar is formed because it is an essential ingredient in 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 galaxy. Milky Way. They identified the sugar as a gas by comparing the telescope signals with lab samples. It's the latest form of sugar to be discovered in space – on NASA's twin spacecraft Voyager, the farthest spacecraft ever to fly from Earth.

The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Scientists have discovered interesting chemicals in our galaxy, including the building blocks of genes and cell components. They saw a cousin to put sugar on the table at the center of the Milky Way about 25 years ago, and the dark grains of the asteroid Bennu found by NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft revealed some sugar and an “amber-like substance.”

The researchers say that the sugars found in the Bennu samples support a theory about the survival mechanisms used by the first forms of life on earth, which may have relied more on messenger molecules instead of the complex biological processes that support them today.

The latter sugar is not essential for life, but it can easily be converted into a form thought to be essential for starting life on Earth. It is also one of the most complex sugars seen so far, says astronomer Erika Hamden with the University of Arizona.

“It's a clear example of things just floating around in the galaxy,” said Hamden, who was not involved in the new research.

This interstellar probe is about understanding how life began. Did distant comets or space rocks bring us essential ingredients? Or did the essential components already exist that eventually gave rise to our solar system?

New sugar provides evidence for the latter theory. Researchers want to look at most sugars in space and learn how they convert into different forms.

Finding them in one place means they may be hiding in the far corners of the galaxy along with other important fragments, said study author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astronomer at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain.

“The essential ingredients for the origin of life may exist in other regions throughout the galaxy, opening the possibility for life to develop elsewhere in the universe,” Jiménez-Serra said.

It is the second time in recent weeks that astronomers have discovered the types of chemicals that may be found in the human kitchen. Last month, researchers studying the “Pink Planet” of the universe announced that they had found it clouds made of salt.