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