Laura Colzi

In a kitchen where you're simultaneously boiling soup, frying meat, and baking bread, everything happens in one pot. That's roughly what the central molecular zone (CMZ) looks like — a dense clump of gas at the very heart of the Milky Way.

In the heart of the Milky Way, in the cloud G+0.693, astronomers caught a sweet signal — emission lines of erythrulose, a simple sugar with four carbon atoms and four oxygen atoms.