Space Sugar Discovered In Binary System Star

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."

Comments

Ur-Quan threat detected

[Pav]

Aren't the Ur-Quan meant to come from that part of space? We are so screwed. ;)

BTW, Star Control II (or the open source Ur-Quan Masters) is a great game and is part of many Linux repos, and also has Win32 binaries. Download it plus a cheat map (it's too hard otherwise) and lose a weekend... it's a great game, universe and story, and it has a quirky sense of humour. Make sure you download the full music and speech, and persist through the early game - it's a little slow.