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

And so this data was shared with a group of astronomers. matched

And to their surprise, when they looked at their data of space, matched

They found that this erythulose fingerprint showed up in this molecular cloud near the centre of the Milky Way, and they then used some other telescopes with deeper observations to see this thing more clearly. matched

It does get into speculative territory. matched

But yes, this is kind of why scientists are interested in sugars more broadly. matched

Now, these clouds are the birthplace of stars and planets. matched

And the team say that if sugar exists in these clouds, it could be transferred to things like asteroids or comets as a star system forms. matched

Now, Earth went through this period of matched

A very heavy bombardment of these asteroids and comets about four billion years ago. matched

So it may be that sugar molecules were brought from somewhere else to the planet's surface, and potentially erythylose could have provided a feedstock for the first nucleic acid. matched

So very simple versions of the building blocks that then became the building blocks of DNA and RNA, if you see what I mean. matched

what do researchers want to do next to try and peer into this a bit further, I guess? matched

Well unlike the search for Spock, now we have the search for sugar. matched

So these researchers are keen to try and find even larger sugars in interstellar space. matched

Now one of the questions is, why this one? matched

They found a four carbon sugar. matched

People have found a two carbon sugar in the past. matched

Yeah, where's the in between? matched

Where's the in-between? matched

Absolutely right. matched

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