I just thought you guys should know.
(via AP)
Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.
…
Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way.
And what a prescient name for our galaxy “Milky Way” has turned out to be!
They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It’s the latest kind of sugar detected in space — in a region crossed by NASA’s twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.
The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Alas, I don’t have a subscription to Nature Astronomy (and wouldn’t understand a word of it if I did). However, I was deeply moved and inspired to create my latest masterpiece depicting what these astronomers surely saw:
SPACE IS FULL OF SUGAR!
(artist rendering)
Iris Vander Pluym
$1 million
Uh, can anybody here tell us what erythrulose tastes like?
Duh, shoulda looked for myself:
Pls resume celebrations.
brb – I’ll fly up to space, taste it, and report back!
I prefer savory.
Do these sciencey-types have any of that?
What, no fairy-cake?
Pierce: is it vegan? Kosher? Halal? I guess it’s not an animal product if it’s found in deep space…where is it found on Earth?
it’s in heaven baybee. heaven’s in outer space rite?
Raging Bee @ # 6: where is it found on Earth?
Same source as my # 1:
Dunno what religious authorities say about any of the above. We’ll need much higher-resolution telescopes to detect raspberries on or near exoplanets. Melons, not quite so much.