Sugar Found In Space: A Sign of Life?

Organic molecules found in gas swaddling a young star.

Carbon (gray), oxygen (red), and hydrogen (white) sugar molecules are seen in an artist's impression.




The molecules that the team detected in space are the simplest form of sugar, called glycoaldehyde, explained lead astronomer Jes Jørgensen of Denmark's Copenhagen University.



Sugary Find a First in Space

This marks the first time sugar has been spotted so close to a sunlike star.

Previously, glycoaldehyde had been found in only two other places in space: near the center of the giant cloud of gas and dust at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy, and in a massive star-forming region located 26,000 light-years from Earth.

"Both of these regions are much further away and were observed with much worse resolution, [so] it was not possible for the astronomers to pinpoint the location of the molecules," Jørgensen said.

The new discovery, which focused on the warm gas swaddling a young star called IRAS 16293-2422, was made using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a large radio telescope located in Chile.

"These results are giving us and other astronomers ammunition," Jørgensen said, "to go out and look for other prebiotic, and possibly more complex, molecules in regions where stars and planets are forming."

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