Astronomers detect erythrulose sugar in interstellar gas

Erythrulose, a sugar molecule better known from raspberries and self-tanners, has been detected in the interstellar medium near the centre of the Milky Way, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy and reported by Euronews. Researchers identified the molecule in gas form by matching radio telescope signals to laboratory spectra. The observations came from two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain aimed at a large gas cloud in the Galactic Centre region.

The find adds another piece to a long-running inventory exercise: mapping which complex organic molecules form in space without biology. Sugars matter because they sit on the chemical road toward the molecules life uses to store information and build cells. Scientists have previously reported other building blocks for genetic material and cell components in the galaxy, and a related sugar was spotted near the Milky Way’s centre roughly a quarter-century ago, Euronews notes.

What makes erythrulose interesting is not that it is “the” sugar of life, but that it can convert into a form thought to be important in origin-of-life chemistry. That shifts the question from whether space contains any sugars to whether space contains families of sugars that can interconvert under realistic conditions. If those conversion pathways work in cold, diffuse clouds of gas and dust, then early planetary systems may start with a richer chemical toolkit than what can be assembled from scratch on a young planet.

The study also lands amid a growing set of samples and observations that blur the line between planetary and interstellar chemistry. Euronews points to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned grains from asteroid Bennu that contained other sugars, including one described as a key DNA ingredient. Taken together, remote detections in gas clouds and lab work on returned rocks push the same practical question: were these compounds delivered to Earth by comets and asteroids, or were they already present in the material that formed the solar system?

Izaskun Jiménez-Serra of Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology, a study author cited by Euronews, said the result suggests key ingredients could be present in other parts of the galaxy as well. The team plans to look for more sugars and to study how they convert between forms, extending a search that increasingly depends on careful spectral identification rather than dramatic one-off discoveries.

The signal came from a Spanish radio telescope dish pointed toward a dense cloud near the Galactic Centre. The molecule itself was confirmed by the mundane step that decides these claims: whether the sky’s spectrum matches the lab’s.