nature.com
First 'true sugar' molecule found in space - offering hints to life's origins
Call it an extra-sweet discovery. A group of astronomers has detected a sugar molecule swirling inside a cloud of gas and dust near the centre of our galaxy. They are calling the molecule — a compound with four carbon atoms called erythrulose — the first true sugar spotted in ‘interstellar’ space. The findings, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy1, could help clarify how life on Earth began. Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed “This is an incredibly exciting result,” says Brett McGuire, an astrochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Astronomers have, for a very long time, been pushing to detect sugars in space.” That’s because they’ve already seen hints that sugars on Earth that are essential to life originated in outer space. For instance, the five-carbon sugar ribose was previously found in some multi-billion-year-old meteorite samples2,3, suggesting that space rocks might have smashed into Earth and delivered this and other sugars. In 2000, astronomers reported the detection of the two-carbon molecule glycolaldehyde — sometimes considered the simplest sugar molecule — in the interstellar space between stars4. But although glycolaldehyde can act similarly to a sugar, “it is not formally a sugar”, McGuire...
