Benjamin Thompson

speaker

746 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Nature Podcast · Briefing Chat: Sweet! Elusive sugar molecules found in space · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

Sugar itself has been hard to find actually in the sort of interstellar medium between stars. matched

Yeah, and this is a sugar called erythrose. matched

Now it's a natural sugar found in raspberries and used in fake tanning lotions. matched

Now this is a four carbon molecule, right? matched

So sugars they have this kind of carbon backbone, and this one has four carbons. matched

Now a two carbon molecule was found back in two thousand. matched

This molecule called glycoaldehyde. matched

Now some folk would say matched

Other people would say it's not really a sugar. matched

And so this is the discovery of a true sugar in inverted commas in interstellar space swirling inside this cloud of gas and dust, as I say, near the centre of our galaxy. matched

Well that's one of the open questions about this work, Nick. matched

Potentially it was produced through chemical reactions on tiny interstellar dust grains. matched

Now, exactly how that happened is to be debated. matched

But how it was found is interesting because it was this kind of combination of work between two groups of scientists. matched

And what happened was a physical chemist in Spain shared some spectrum matched

Microscopic data about erythrose. matched

So these are kind of the specific fingerprints of wavelengths that a molecule emits. matched

Think about like a drawing of a comb, I suppose. matched

Every molecule has its own individual comb. matched

And so it's been quite hard to get this kind of data for sugars until relatively recently. matched

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