We’ve spent decades wondering if there’s complex alien life out here and whether it’ll be terrifying invaders or sweet and friendly like E.T. While we wait for either one of them to show up, we did end up finding something literally sweet: sugar. Specifically, erythrulose, a naturally occurring sugar found in raspberries and other foods, has been detected floating through interstellar space.
According to a paper published in Nature Astronomy, reported by The New York Times, sugar comes from a massive cloud of gas and dust near the center of the Milky Way. Using radio telescopes in Spain, astronomers identified erythrulose by matching its unique radio signature to laboratory measurements. If you’re wondering how scientists were able to detect a chemical compound like sugar deep in space, it has nothing to do with the chemical itself but rather with the distinct pattern a molecule emits when it rotates through space, which lets scientists identify compounds from thousands of light-years away.
Sugar Is Actually Really Important to Life, Probably Alien Life Too
On the surface, this sounds like a cute, novel story, but it’s actually rather important: sugars are fundamental to the development of life, as they power cells and help form RNA and DNA.
This discovery not only supports the idea that sugar is one of the essential ingredients of life, but also the idea that sugar may have formed long before the Earth was ever even a thought in the universe’s mind. The finding was a prize for the researchers, who expected to detect simpler three-carbon sugars and instead found a more complex four-carbon erythrulose and found no trace of the simpler ones.
While the find conjures images of a giant raspberry floating through space, this sugar likely isn’t exactly edible, but it does suggest that it’s possible life exists out there, somewhere, because one of life’s key ingredients is most certainly out there, bouncing around, intermingling with celestial objects like the upwards of 50 million tons of sugar that helped create the Earth.
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