Astronomers discover sugar in space that's also found in raspberries
The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what's called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.
The space between stars just got a little sweeter.
Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they're a key ingredient for 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 Milky Way . They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It's the latest kind of sugar detected in space — in a region crossed by NASA's twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.
The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Scientists have found interesting chemistry in our galaxy, including building blocks for genetic material and parts of the cell. They spotted a cousin to table sugar near the center of the Milky Way about 25 years ago, and black grains from asteroid Bennu retrieved by NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft yielded other sugars and a "gum-like substance."