Astronomers Find A Raspberry-Flavored Sweet Spot In Deep Space

by Aaron Leong — Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 10:27 AM EDT

In a study published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers has detected the first true sugar molecule in interstellar space, giving us a clue that sugar can exist way before planets begin to form.

Using Spain's Yebes 40-meter and IRAM 30-meter radio telescopes, the team, led by Izaskun Jiménez-Serra at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, managed to find the unique rotational data of erythrulose. This four-carbon simple sugar, known on Earth for giving raspberries their flavor and acting as an active ingredient in self-tanning lotions, was found floating in the massive, frigid molecular cloud G+0.693-0.027.

Located roughly 27,000 light-years away near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, this region of gas and dust is a well-known chemical factory, but the discovery of a four-carbon monosaccharide is huge. Previously, scientists had only detected simpler, sugar-like substances such as glycolaldehyde, a two-carbon molecule.

sugar cloud — *Composite image of G+0.693-0.027 (Credit: Ashley Barnes / Izaskun Jiménez-Serra / Juan García de la Concepción)*

One thing that that the sugar discovery challenges is a longstanding assumption about where and how the complex biology machine originates. In the ultra-cold, low-pressure conditions of space, molecules are traditionally thought to remain simple. However, the presence of erythrulose points to a process where complex organic chemistry takes place on the icy mantles of interstellar dust grains—and remember, this is presumably occurring far from the warmth of developing stars. According to the study, simple precursors like glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol react on these frozen dust surfaces, eventually being shaken into gas form by passing shockwaves from cloud shearing and collisions.

While erythrulose is not itself a component of genetic material, its biological implications are quite significant. In the presence of water, this ketose sugar easily converts into its structural relative, threose, a critical precursor in prebiotic chemistry. Threose is linked to the formation of TNA (threose nucleic acid), a suspected ancestor to modern RNA and DNA. And because these molecular clouds eventually collapse to form stars, planets, and asteroids, the research suggests that the building blocks of genetic material may already be present in abundance before planets even exist.

The research team calculated that between 0.5 and 55 million tons of this sugar could have been delivered to the early Earth by comets and meteorites during its infancy.

Main image: IR view of the Milky Way's center (Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory–Caltech)