La Jornada: Finding natural sugars floating in space could change the search for life

Scientists have found natural sugars floating in interstellar space and this could radically change the search for extraterrestrial life.

The researchers detected erythrulose, present on Earth in raspberries and self-tanners, towards the center of our galaxy.

This could help answer one of the biggest questions about the origins of life on Earth and how it might have formed elsewhere in the universe.

Sugars are essential for living organisms: they form the basis of the DNA and RNA that make us up, and they help drive key biological processes. Researchers also believe that they would have played a fundamental role in the origin of life.

But despite their importance, astronomers still don’t know how these sugars could have formed, here or elsewhere. Laboratory experiments, for example, show that they would not form under the conditions that existed before life arose.

Astronomers had already found sugars in samples of meteorites and asteroids, suggesting that some could come from the primordial molecular cloud that formed our solar system. However, no samples had been discovered in the interstellar medium found between stars in space.

Now researchers have found such a sample in the direction of the molecular cloud known as G+0.693-0.027, which is located near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

They detected it using ultrasensitive surveys carried out with two powerful telescopes.

In the data obtained by those telescopes, the researchers found information that matched that of erythrulose when measured in a laboratory.

That research also showed that the complex sugar – which is the only possible four-carbon ketone – is much more common than similar, less complex three-carbon sugars, of which they found none. “This finding was unexpected, since the predominant opinion in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules increase in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms,” explained Izaskun Jiménez Serra, lead author of the new work.

This suggests that between 0.5 and 50 million tons of sugar could have reached Earth during the Great Late Bombardment, about 4 billion years ago. If so, it could have contributed to the beginning of the development of life on Earth, according to the researchers.

The work is published in a new article titled “Detection of a four-carbon chiral sugar in interstellar space,” published in the journal Nature Astronomy .