Sugar discovered floating in deep space for the first time
Popular Science...
For the first time, astrobiologists have positively identified something sweet in outer space. According to a study published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team successfully pinpointed a type of sugar called erythrulose inside a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Here on Earth, the four-carbon compound is most often found in sunless tanning creams and raspberries.
Life as we know it is built on sugars. The biomolecules are both integral to metabolic processes, while also serving as foundations for both DNA and RNA. But despite their importance, evolutionary biologists still aren’t quite sure how the first sugars on Earth developed.. Experiments indicate that the planet’s prebiotic conditions billions of years ago simply did not offer the conditions needed to form substantial enough amounts of the molecules. However, astronomers have previously detected sugars like glucose and ribose inside asteroid and meteorite fragments—suggesting that life on Earth may have received a little sweet encouragement from deep space.
For this new study, researchers conducted a cosmic spectroscopic survey using a pair of highly sensitive telescopes at the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM) near Grenoble, France. After analyzing a region close to the gaseous cloud called G+0.693-0.027 (located about 27,000 light-years away from Earth), the team identified 12 spectral lines matching previously measured samples of erythrulose. They also measured at least eight times more erythrulose than similar three-carbon sugars in the cloud, which included none of the latter variants. Study co-author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrophysicist at Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), called her team’s discoveries completely unexpected.
“The prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms,” she explained in a statement.
Following additional investigations by chemists at Spain’s University of Extremadura and Radboud University in the Netherlands, the team determined that erythrulose is capable of forming inside interstellar ice particles from simpler alcohols and other molecules. In fact, there is so much erythrulose inside G+0.693−0.027 that scientists calculated anywhere between 0.5 and 55 million tons of the sugar may have landed on Earth 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, during a formative cosmic era known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. This would have been more than enough to assist in the development of the planet’s first replication and metabolic processes that ultimately led to life.
“The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life,” added study co-author and CAB astrobiologist Carlos Briones.
The post Sugar discovered floating in deep space for the first time appeared first on Popular Science.