Sweet Milky Way: raspberry sugar found in space

BarcelonaInterstellar sugar. An international team of scientists has found the presence of erythrulose in space for the first time, a sugar composed of four carbon atoms that on Earth is found in raspberries – and is added to self-tanning creams – and which is considered a key piece for the construction of genetic material such as RNA. The finding, published yesterday in the journal Nature Astronomy, marks a turning point in astrochemistry because it suggests that an extraterrestrial molecular cloud "bombarded" our planet about 4 billion years ago and gave rise to the first forms of life as we know them.Sugars had previously been detected in asteroids and comets that impact the Earth's surface, but it has now been confirmed that erythrulose forms naturally in space. The samples were found in a giant gas cloud in the center of the Milky Way called G+0.693-0.027, which acts like a chemical laboratory. The identification was made possible thanks to two radio telescopes located in Yebes (Guadalajara) and Granada, in work coordinated by Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA). Astrophysicists calculate that these sugars form on the small grains of dust and ice in space and are incorporated into asteroids and comets. When the Earth was just forming, there was a massive bombardment of meteorites that delivered between 0.5 and 50 million tons of erythrulose, which spurred the origin of life. What does this discovery mean? Knowing that complex and vital elements like sugars did not originate on our planet, but rather come from space millions of light-years away.