Space Sugar a Clue to Life's Origins
Discovery of Molecule in Region of Extreme Cold Indicates Possibility the Beginning Came From 'Out There'
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 27, 2004; Page A07
A cotton candy-like cloud of simple sugar drifts in the unspeakably cold center of the Milky Way about 26,000 light years away, offering a remote, yet tantalizing, hint of how the building blocks of life may have reached Earth billions of years ago.
This frigid cloud is composed of molecular glycolaldehyde, a sugar that, when it reacts with other sugars or carbon molecules, can form a more complex sugar called ribose, the starting point for DNA and RNA, which carry the genetic code for all living things.
Astronomers have known about sugar in space for some time, but new research reported last week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters showed that gaseous sugar could exist at extremely low temperatures, as are found in regions on the fringes of the solar system where comets are born.
Thus, while many scientists agree that life probably derived from a rich "primordial soup" concocted in the warm-water puddles of early Earth, the new research offers fresh evidence for another popular view -- that life, or at least some of its basic ingredients, may have flown in from interstellar space aboard a comet or asteroid.
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[ Full text at washingtonpost.com ] |
