Outer space: it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s mostly empty. And it’s occasionally very sweet.
Astronomers peering into the heart of our galaxy have spotted traces of erythrulose, the same kind of sugar that’s found in raspberries, kiwis, and other fruits, speckled in a giant gas cloud.
The delectable discovery, detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, is the first time sugar, a key ingredient for life, has been detected in interstellar space.
The detection “tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,” study lead author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist at Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology, told The Guardian. “It opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar fashion to what it did on Earth.”
