Indeed, as the classic rhyme suggests, girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” Well, as it turns out, at least one of these may also be connected with the existence alien life in the distant cosmos. How, you might ask? The answer may lie in a specific sugar molecule, known for its association with life’s beginnings here on Earth, which was recently spotted “in a potentially habitable region of our galaxy.”
Wired News reported today that “The molecule, called glycolaldehyde, was spotted in a large star-forming area of space around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the less-chaotic outer regions of the Milky Way. This suggests the sugar could be common across the universe, which is good news for extraterrestrial-life seekers.” To read the complete Wired News article, click here.
Of course, this isn’t exactly breaking-news, as it was first reported back in 2004 by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory that that “a frigid reservoir of simple sugar molecules in a cloud of gas and dust” had been spotted some 26,000 light-years away. The article, titled “Cold Sugar in Space Provides Clue to the Molecular Origin of Life,” first suggested “that the molecular building blocks for the creation of life on a new planet might get a head start in the dust of interstellar clouds.”
What a sweet discovery! Oh… enough with the puns…
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