All articles tagged with #erythrulose
Astronomers have detected erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, in a molecular cloud near the Milky Way’s center, marking the first true sugar found in interstellar space and supporting ideas that complex organic molecules crucial to life can form in space and may have been delivered to early Earth via comets and meteorites.
Astronomers directly detected erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, in the Milky Way’s molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 using Spain’s Yebes 40-meter and IRAM 30-meter telescopes. The sugar’s spectral fingerprint matched 12 lines, and erythrulose was found to be eight times more abundant than simpler sugars, revealing chemical complexity in space before stars or planets form and suggesting life-building blocks may pre-exist in star-forming clouds; researchers plan to search for larger sugars like ribose next.
Ultrasensitive broadband spectral surveys with the Yebes 40 m and IRAM 30 m telescopes led to the first detection of erythrulose, a four‑carbon ketose, in the interstellar medium toward the Galactic Centre cloud G+0.693−0.027. Erythrulose is at least 8–17 times more abundant than the undetected C3 sugars in this cloud, and its formation is explained by grain-surface chemistry combining glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol via fast hydrogen-abstracting reactions on icy dust grains, followed by an intersystem crossing to yield the chiral sugar. Astrophysical modeling (LTE fits and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations) reproduces its presence under typical Galactic Centre conditions, suggesting interstellar sugars could contribute to prebiotic inventories and potentially to the origin of biological homochirality on early Earth, linking ISM chemistry to meteoritic organics and solar-system material.
Astronomers detected erythrulose, a four‑carbon sugar, in a massive interstellar dust cloud (G+0.693-0.027) near the Milky Way’s center. The sugar forms on microscopic dust grains from glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol at around -250°C and could be delivered to planets via comets or meteorites. This marks the first direct detection of a sugar in interstellar space and suggests simple sugars important for life may be more common in the cosmos, potentially seeding early Earth during periods of heavy bombardment.