【#Tech24H】Scientists from the Spanish National Research Council—National Institute of Aerospace Technology have reported the detection of a four-carbon sugar called erythrulose in a large gas and dust cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They also found that the abundance of erythrulose in this gas cloud is extremely high. A joint Spanish-Dutch team further analyzed and estimated that approximately 500,000 to 55 million tons of this sugar may have fallen to Earth between 4.1 billion and 3.8 billion years ago during the early evolution of the solar system, which helped Earth complete early metabolic and replication processes, ultimately leading to the emergence of life. This discovery demonstrates that complex molecules relevant to biology can form in space and may have provided the chemical raw materials for early metabolic and replication processes.