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Cold Sugar Cloud Found in Space
Roland Piquepaille writes "A cloud filled with simple molecules of sugar has been found 26,000 light-years away from us, near the middle of our galaxy. The 8-atom sugar molecules exist in a gas cloud named Sagittarius B2 at a temperature of only 8 degrees above absolute zero. Too far and too cold to bake your next cake! However, even if chemistry reactions on Earth and in this frigid sugar cloud are very different, astronomers think this discovery "suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space." Please read the original article for more details or just enjoy these illustrations describing how prebiotic chemistry -- the formation of the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life -- occurs in interstellar clouds."
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Most people agree Roland "Fuckeyfacey" Piquepaille's Technology Trends is a bullshit website.
Yet we keep seeing it linked from Slashdot.
I wouldn't mind if someone stole the content of Roland's article, removed the bullshit, added some more informative links, and then pretended to have stumbled across whatever it was, and posted it to Slashdot.
But I wish they would stop accepting submissions from him. He is just shitting all over slashdot for referral ad money.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A cloud filled with simple molecules of sugar has been found 26,000 light-years away from us, near the middle of our Milky Way Galaxy. The 8-atom sugar molecules exist in a gas cloud named Sagittarius B2 at a temperature of only 8 degrees above absolute zero. Too far and too cold to bake your next cake! However, even if chemistry reactions on Earth and in this frigid sugar cloud are very different, astronomers think this "discovery suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space." I'm not qualified to say if their claims are funded, but don't hesitate to tell me if they're right or wrong.
Please read the original article for more astronomical details or just enjoy the illustrations below describing how prebiotic chemistry -- the formation of the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life -- occurs in interstellar clouds.
[IMAGE] This illustration shows how processes may produce complex molecules in cold interstellar space. (Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF) [IMAGE] And this one shows that prebiotic chemistry -- the formation of the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life -- occurs in interstellar clouds long before that cloud collapses to form a new solar system with planets. (Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)The above acronyms in the credits for the illustrations refer respectively to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) .
Sources: SpaceRef.com, September 20, 2004; and various websites
This sugar (glycoaldehyde) + a 3 carbon sugar = ribose = a building block of deoxyribonucleic acid. See the original link
Same way you determine the molecular structure of a compound sitting on the lab bench. Molecular structure is usually detemined by spectroscopy - looking at the electromagnetic radiation the compound absorbs/emits. (What - you thought we used a BIG microscope?) They probably looked at the spectrum of the cloud, and saw charachteristic wavelengths missing and/or present, and concluded that it was due to the presence of the "sugar" molecule.
BTW: The "sugar" molecule they found is glycolaldehyde. While technically a sugar from a chemist's point of view [it obeys the C(n)H(2n)O(n) rule - here n=2], it would hardly be considered a sugar from a biochemist's or nutritionist's one. It's only a two carbon molecule, and isn't even on any of the normal metabolism paths. Although there probably is a bacteria that can digest it (bacteria can digest practically anything) this "sugar" would probably be non-nutrative - if anything it would give you gas.
Oh ... and in case anyone is wondering, yes, I *am* a biochemist.
As the article mentions, the detection of glycolaldehyde is of interest because it is a precursor to ribose. We're not talking about metabolic processes here - we're talking about the availability of the very basic chemicals that formed the first nontrivially self-replicating collections of molecules.
Glycolaldehyde is also of interest because it is involved in an autocatalytic reaction that essentially converts formaldehyde into glycolaldehyde. As such, it is one of the most fundamental examples of self-replicating molecules. Certainly not nearly as complex as those seen in biology (prions, for example), but the fact that this reaction might take place in the depths of space is interesting - particularly when one considers the possibility of a glycolaldehyde/formaldehyde cloud entering the atmosphere of a planet such as Earth, where conditions are likely much better to sustain the autocatalytic reaction.
I drink water fairly well, and that's carbon-free.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The fact you got modded up to +3 goes to show just how few Slashdotters know much about astrophysics. This proposal is completely infeasible.
.785m^2. Multiply that by 4 * 10^16 meters and you get a total volume of roughly 3 * 10^16 cubic meters.
Take a cylinder a meter wide, from here to Alpha Centauri. Tally up how much matter is there inside of it. I would tell you just how little there is, but you wouldn't believe me, so let's go through the math so you know I'm not yanking your chain. On average, there's about one atom per cubic centimeter of space. Thus, in one cubic meter there's about 10^6 atoms.
One mole of hydrogen, with a mass of one gram, is 6.023 * 10^23 atoms.
One cubic meter of interstellar space has a mass of 1.6 * 10^-18 grams, or 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms.
It's about four lightyears to Alpha Centauri, or 4 * 10^16 meters, approximately. So a cylinder a meter across would have a cross-section of quarter-pi square meters, or about
Multiply 3 * 10^16 cubic meters by 1.6 * 10^-21 kilograms per cubic meter and what do you get?
You get the total mass of all the matter in a cylinder from here to Alpha Centauri. Something on the order of a fraction of a gram. You leave orders of magnitude more matter in a Kleenex when you sneeze.
You may want to radically rethink your proposal for farming interstellar gas. There just ain't much of it out there.
The Rankine temperature scale starts at absolute zero and uses degrees Fahrenheit. But as far as I know, no one uses it.
I seem to remember seeing it in an old rocket engine design manual, talking about propellant boiling points. Weird stuff is in those old manuals!
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Multiple meanings of the word "organic." In the chemical sense, a compound is organic if it is composed largely of carbon and hydrogen. The simplest organic compounds (hydrocarbons) contain only carbon and hydrogen. More complex ones are formed by, effectively, removing one or more of the hydrogen atoms and attaching something else ("something else" can of course be very complex in this case.) There are lots and lots of organic compounds, including many sugars, out there which have origins which are not "organic" in the sense you're thinking of.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.