A sweet surprise: scientists find sugar deep in our galaxy

OUR understanding of the Milky Way just got a little bit sweeter.

For the first time, scientists have spotted sugar in interstellar space, providing an important clue about the origins of sugar on Earth and possibly the rise of life, according to a new paper published on Monday (Jul 13) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Sugar’s origins on Earth are mysterious. Scientists know it must have been present very early on, because it is a necessity for life to arise. But lab experiments to recreate the necessary chemical conditions have repeatedly failed to create these molecules.

So how did sugar get here? Scientists think it could have been delivered to Earth by asteroid and comet impacts early in the planet’s history, because several kinds of sugars, including glucose and ribose, have been found on asteroids and meteorites.

But the question of where they came from before that went unanswered.

“People had a lot of interest in trying to find these molecules,” said Izaskun Jimenez-Serra, an astrochemist at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain who led the new study.

The Milky Way’s interstellar medium was a likely spot for sugar. The interstellar medium is all the dust and gases in between solar systems, and despite it having extreme conditions, it’s “an impressive chemical factory”, the authors of the new study wrote.

Hundreds of molecules, including some building blocks of the cellular messenger RNA, have been found there. And laboratory experiments suggested that sugars could form from chemical reactions in ices in the interstellar medium.

So if they were going to spot sugar, it would make sense to find it in there.

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Building blocks of life on Earth

One of the patterns from a nebula near the centre of the Milky Way matched up with that of a sugar called erythrulose.

Erythrulose is made of four carbon atoms, eight hydrogen atoms and four oxygen atoms. It is found on Earth in raspberries.

The new finding confirms that sugar can form without life in the interstellar medium, and even before stars and planets have formed. That is a critical first step to forming RNA and DNA, and to explaining how life arose on Earth.

It also makes it more likely that life could have formed somewhere else.

“If the interstellar medium is capable of forming these ingredients, it could also be found in other molecular clouds across the galaxy, enhancing the chances for life to develop elsewhere,” Jimenez-Serra said. NYTIMES