--- title: "You’ll Never Guess What Tasty Molecule Astronomers Just Detected In Space" description: "Astronomers peering in the heart of the Milky Way have spotted sugar floating in space for the first time." date: "2026-07-18" modified: "2026-07-18" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/space/sugar-molecule-detected-interstellar-medium" categories: - "Astronomy" - "Exobiology" - "Space" --- # You’ll Never Guess What Tasty Molecule Astronomers Just Detected In Space ![A photo illustration of space with a spoon imposed over it, full of a white granular substance.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock* Outer space: it's cold, it's dark, it's mostly empty. And it's occasionally very sweet. Astronomers peering into the heart of our galaxy have spotted traces of erythrulose, the same kind of sugar that's found in raspberries, kiwis, and other fruits, speckled in a giant gas cloud. The delectable discovery, detailed in a [new study]() published in the journal *Nature Astronomy*, is the first time sugar, a key ingredient for life, has been detected in interstellar space. The detection "tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought," study lead author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist at Spain's Centre for Astrobiology, [told *The Guardian*](). "It opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar fashion to what it did on Earth." Sugar's origins on Earth remain a mystery. Ribose and glucose [have been found on asteroids](), and some scientists believe that, [like water](), the compound was first brought here by wayward space rocks that crashed into our planet. But where are these sugars forming in space? One likely culprit is molecular clouds, the dense regions of the gas and dust that make up the universe's interstellar medium. These clouds can act as a "chemical factory," the researchers wrote, fusing disparate atoms together to form more complex substances, with more than 340 molecules having been detected in the interstellar medium so far. To carry out their saccharine search, the researchers used two radio telescopes in Spain to peer into a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. Where earlier searches would have struggled to make sense of all the noise coming out of the highly dense region, theirs was — quite literally — laser-focused. Another team recently developed a way to recreate sugar's light signature in space when vaporized with a laser, *Scientific American* [noted](), and this allowed them to narrow their focus. What they found was unexpected. The cloud was swimming in erythrulose, which is made of four carbon atoms. But there were almost no signs of sugars made from three carbon atoms, *SciAm* explained, cutting against the prevailing belief that sugars gradually formed by adding one carbon atom at a time. This led the team to suspect that the four-carbon sugar was formed by two other organic molecules that each contain a carbon pair. It's a major boon for astrobiology. Sugars like ribose and deoxyribose form the backbone of RNA and DNA. And erythrulose in particular can form ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA. In all, they estimated that up to 50 million tons of erythrulose could have rained down on Earth while life was still in its primordial age. "To have suffered this kind of rain of organics, I think that seems to have been a key step," Jiménez-Serra told *The Guardian*. "That material could have contributed to prebiotic soups where the first biomolecules were synthesized." **More on space:** [*Scientists Say They’ve Identified an Earth-Like Planet Right Next Door*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()