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Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it would taste vaguely of raspberries.

The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life.

Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules.

In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

"It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.

Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum.

The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star.

Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies depending on the type of molecule.

While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud. The two molecules are the largest yet discovered in deep space.

Dr Belloche and his colleague Robin Garrod at Cornell University in New York have collected nearly 4,000 distinct signals from the cloud but have only analysed around half of these.

"So far we have identified around 50 molecules in our survey, and two of those had not been seen before," said Belloche.

The results are being presented today at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire.

Last year, the team came tantalisingly close to finding amino acids in space with the discovery of a molecule that can be used to make them, called amino acetonitrile.

The latest discoveries have boosted the researchers' morale because the molecules are as large as the simplest amino acid, glycine. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are widely seen as being critical for complex life to exist anywhere in the universe.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we find an amino acid out there in the coming years," said Belloche.

Previously, astronomers have detected a variety of large molecules, including alcohols, acids and chemicals called aldehydes.

"The difficulty in searching for complex molecules is that the best astronomical sources contain so many different molecules that their 'fingerprints' overlap and are difficult to disentangle," Belloche said.

The molecules are thought to form when chemicals that already exist on some dust grains, such as ethanol, link together to make more complex chains.

"There is no apparent limit to the size of molecules that can be formed by this process, so there's good reason to expect even more complex organic molecules to be there," said Garrod.

Bean The Dynamite

Jan 11 2013, 06:21 PM

Anyway, to get onto this topic, I'm not saying that it is exactly true, but you need to think, there are thousands of different types of elements in the universe. The Periodic Table is about 1 out of probably over a billion different elements this universe contains. Don't underestimate scientists or astronomers because what we know that they can do to discover new things is only a portion of what they do.

Richard Feynman

Feb 18 2013, 02:50 PM

Bean The Dynamite

Jan 11 2013, 06:21 PM

Anyway, to get onto this topic, I'm not saying that it is exactly true, but you need to think, there are thousands of different types of elements in the universe. The Periodic Table is about 1 out of probably over a billion different elements this universe contains. Don't underestimate scientists or astronomers because what we know that they can do to discover new things is only a portion of what they do.

Not to sound like an ass in correcting you, buuuuuuuuuuut... There's probably not all that many more elements than the ones we've already discovered. Perhaps a few more, but they're EXTREMELY unlikely to be found naturally in the universe. Once the atoms start to get so big, they become extremely unstable and quick to decay and fall apart. A fair lot of the atoms on our Periodic Table, the heaviest ones, are synthetic: not found naturally anywhere, but interesting to create in a lab for the purpose of examining certain atomic principles. Most of the universe is made up of the lighter elements, like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon. Which, interestingly, are the building blocks of life as we know it (except for helium). It would seem that it's not statistically unlikely that life similar to Earth's exists somewhere out in the cosmos, when its constituent elements and molecules are actually startling common.

But enough of me rambling about that. I think this is vaguely interesting, if only for poetic purposes. Scientifically, I can't think of any importance to pin on the center of the Milky Way tasting like raspberries and smelling like rum. I'm more interested in how important those molecules are to the formation of life. And even still, it seems unlikely that life would come about in such an odd environment (a cloud of dust in space!), mainly due to reasons of a lack of sufficient heat and pressure, which may or may not be conducive to the formation of organic molecules, I'm not sure. Don't take my word. Regardless of my inability to properly articulate a reason, I think it's doubtful we'd find life there.

Neo Metallix

Feb 18 2013, 11:43 AM

A famous Sherlock Holmes quote is this: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. Now there is a huge difference between the two and honestly I feel like they're trying to find stuff based on theories rather than actually looking at the data and following up with theories.

It seems like scientists now days have theories and try to find facts to support it. When you're looking for something you can always find some sort of way to prove it whether it is the whole picture, true, or not...

Bean The Dynamite

Feb 19 2013, 02:50 AM

I can agree to that, but it really just comes down to one thing. We all don't know. We would just have to wait for people to find out. And yes, this discovery of the raspberry-tasting and rum-smelling center of the galaxy was just an accident because they were still searching for the origin of life. And also, if I'm not correct, they already found planets that is possible to carry life, but they're extremely far away, too close to the sun for us to handle, too much of a gravitational pull to handle (it's at least 2x bigger than our Earth), and yeah, the big thing is, it's too far away. I don't know, I'd have to look at that and find the link to it. All I know that the name starts out with KOI or whatever. But yeah, you're right, we wouldn't really find that much different elements because really, the elements we find in Earth are pretty much from all around the universe. And back to the life thing, I believe there's life out there. But like you said, I doubt it that we would FIND life out there.