Space Sugar Discovered In Binary System Star 94
SchrodingerZ writes "Sweet tooths rejoice! 400 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, sugar molecules have been confirmed in a gas cloud surrounding a young star. The star, IRAS 16293-2422, though early in its life is relativity close to the size of our Sun. It is part of a Binary star system. '"In the disk of gas and dust surrounding this newly formed star, we found glycolaldehyde, which is a simple form of sugar, not much different to the sugar we put in coffee," study lead author Jes Jorgensen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, said in a statement.' Glycolaldehyde has been found before in space, but never this close to a Sun-like planet. In fact 'the molecules are about the same distance away from the star as the planet Uranus is from our sun.' This discovery proves that the building blocks of life could have possibly existed in the earlier parts of our own solar system. This particular sugar reacts with propenal to form ribose, which is a major component for organic life on Earth."
Re:Reacts with propenal (Score:4, Interesting)
I feed my bacteria in the lab plenty of artificially synthesised compounds and they don't give a damn. Based on life as we know it, if it's availabe and it can use it then life will usually find some way of taking it up regardless of source.
The better question is do the chemicals react to form ribose under the conditions in space, or can they survive the transfer to somewhere they will react?
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Interesting)
A sugar molecule is as far from an amoeba as a piece of quartz frim a supercomputer. Insisting that living things came from nonliving matter by random processes is absurd. Anyone who thinks that is being far more dogmatic than the creationists they stubbornly ridicule.
Where to start...
Amino acids are found in deep space, not exactly a prime spot for the development of life.
We know that living things came from nonliving matter (and energy), because the universe was once in a state where living matter could not exist, yet now living matter is rife in at least one place.
The universe and its processes are not entirely random. If they were, this sugar would not exist either.
It's the very opposite of "dogmatic" to base your views on evidence.
Yours might have been an OK troll the first day the internet existed, but now it's as far from "nice troll" as a sugar molecule is from an amoeba.