Erythrulose sugar detected in interstellar cloud
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- Izaskun Jiménez-Serra and her team at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid aimed radio telescopes at molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, 26,700 light years away, and detected erythrulose — a four-carbon sugar also found in raspberries — in what Jiménez-Serra called 'a huge amount'.
- The team initially checked for simpler three-carbon sugars glyceraldehyde and dihydroxyacetone and got nothing; erythrulose produced strong signals after Jiménez-Serra decided to look for a more complex candidate, prompting her reaction: 'I can't believe this! This is really getting detected!'
- The discovery addresses a chicken-and-egg puzzle in origins-of-life research: living organisms synthesize sugars using enzymes, while pre-life Earth simulations have produced relatively few — pointing instead to delivery from space.
- Jiménez-Serra estimates the cloud could have delivered 500,000 to 50 million tonnes of erythrulose to the young Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment roughly 4 billion years ago, with the molecule potentially forming before the solar system itself.
- Niels Ligterink at TU Delft in the Netherlands said chemistry on icy dust grains chilled to around -250°C and bombarded by intense radiation likely produced these molecules, concluding: 'we can now say that the ingredients for biochemistry are likely spread throughout the galaxy.'
- Yoshihiro Furukawa at Tohoku University in Japan called the finding 'very exciting,' adding it 'points to an additional source of sugar distribution beyond asteroids. We have been waiting for an actual detection like this.'
Why it matters: The detection gives origins-of-life research its first confirmed interstellar sugar signal — quantified by Jiménez-Serra at 500,000 to 50 million tonnes potentially delivered to early Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment — and, per Ligterink, shifts the prevailing framing from 'nearby meteorites seeded Earth' to biochemistry's building blocks being distributed across the galaxy.
