Found: Milky Way's Sweet Spot

Dec. 9, 2008 -- The search for life beyond Earth doesn't always require rovers on Mars, radio scans of nearby stars or telescopes powerful enough to image Earth-like planets. For some astronomers, learning about whether life exists elsewhere in the universe is a matter of molecules.

Maria Beltran, with the University of Barcelona's Department of Astronomy, and several European colleagues found a fairly simple molecule known as glycolaldehyde, an eight-atomed entity -- two carbon, two oxygen, four hydrogen -- more commonly known as sugar.

What's interesting about glycolaldehyde is how easily it combines with a three-carbon sugar to produce ribose, the building blocks of DNA and RNA, which carry genetic information for living things.

"Glycolaldehyde is...directly linked to the origin of life," writes Beltran, lead author of a paper accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The discovery isn't the first detection of glycolaldehyde in space. That honor was claimed nine years ago by a group of U.S. scientists who found the sugar in a giant cloud of gas and dust known as Sagittarius B2, located about 26,000 light-years away near the center of our galaxy.

The sugar was found in very cold place, about eight degrees above absolute zero, the temperature at which molecular motion stops. Beltran's team found glycolaldehyde in a relatively warm (300 degrees above absolute zero) and dense star-forming region of the Milky Way where conditions are ripe for planetary systems.