An international team led by Isaskun Jiménez-Serra from Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología has detected erythulose — a genuine sugar belonging to the same family as fructose — in a molecular cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. This is the first true sugar ever found in the interstellar medium, and the discovery was published in Nature Astronomy.
The molecule was spotted in cloud G+0.693−0.027, roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, using two radio telescopes in Spain: the 40-metre dish at Yebes and the 30-metre telescope at Pico Veleta. Each molecule emits radio waves at characteristic frequencies, and researchers identified 17 distinct spectral lines of erythulose, with only a 0.2% probability of random coincidence. Erythulose is also the largest non-cyclic molecule known in interstellar space — 14 atoms including four oxygen atoms, a first for a cosmic molecule.
Modelling suggests the sugar forms directly in space, on icy surfaces of interstellar dust grains, from simpler two-carbon building blocks like glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol. The implications for the origin of l
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