Astronomers detected a true sugar in interstellar space for the first time
A Spanish-led team has detected erythrulose, a four-carbon ketose and the first true monosaccharide ever confirmed in interstellar space, inside a molecular cloud near the Galactic Center roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth. The preprint, posted to arXiv on June 2, draws a line from a specific interstellar molecule to the chemistry of TNA (Threose Nucleic Acid), a simpler genetic polymer that may have preceded RNA on early Earth. Not the first “sugar in space” headline, but the first actual sugar You may remember headlines from 2012 about sugar molecules found near a young star. Those referred to glycolaldehyde, a two-carbon hydroxyaldehyde with the formula C₂H₄O₂. It’s the simplest molecule that participates in sugar chemistry, and it can react with other molecules to eventually form ribose. But glycolaldehyde isn’t a sugar. It has two carbon atoms; the smallest molecule that counts as a monosaccharide needs at least three. ...