Milky Way's sweet centre may be the flavour of life

[emad]

The Times
By Mark Henderson
THE Milky Way has a sweet centre: scientists have discovered a clump of frozen sugar near the heart of our galaxy.


Molecules of a simple sugar known as glycoaldehyde have been detected in a cloud of gas and dust called Sagittarius B2, approximately 26,000 light years from Earth, in a finding that could offer insights into the origins of life.

If sugars, which are among the key building blocks of life, can exist in the cold depths of space, there is a good chance that life’s beginnings can be traced to chemical reactions within interstellar clouds. This could indicate that the fundamental constituents of life were produced in space and carried to Earth — and potentially to other planets — on comets and meteors, which “seeded” worlds with the raw material for living organisms.

Glycoaldehyde consists of two carbon atoms, two oxygen atoms and four hydrogen atoms, and is a type of molecule known as a 2-carbon sugar. These can react with 3-carbon sugars to produce another molecule known as a 5-carbon sugar ribose, which is a constituent of RNA, a genetic signalling chemical.

Jan Hollis, a radio astronomer at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that the discovery suggests that interstellar chemical reactions are a likely source of “prebiotic” molecules from which life ultimately evolved. “Many of the interstellar molecules discovered are the kinds detected in laboratory experiments designed to synthesise prebiotic molecules,” he said. “This fact suggests a universal prebiotic chemistry.”

The molecules appear to be generated when gravitational attraction causes lumps to form in interstellar clouds. These coalesce into stars and planets. Any sugars would probably be destroyed by the heat generated by this process. But sugars may survive in very cold wastes beyond the planet-building zones of embryonic solar systems, the region where comets form.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1273911,00.html

Life is sweet?

[The empressof all]

1. Must be why people love sweets so much

It's like going home.