A Sweet Discovery: Astronomers Say Sugar Is Lurking in the Space Between Stars

A meteor is photographed near the Milky Way during the annual Perseid meteor shower in Pico de las Nieves, on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain, August 13, 2021. Photo by Borja Suarez/REUTERS

The space between stars just got a little sweeter.

Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.

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.

(Source: phys.org)