Possibility of sugars past Pluto

In 2019, at 6.4 billion km from home, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft snapped photos and collected spectra as it whizzed past a funky red space rock in the Kuiper Belt. That rock became the most distant object in our solar system ever explored by a spacecraft in a flyby. It was later named Arrokoth, which means "sky" in Powhatan/Algonquian. Now an international team of earthbound researchers has revealed that Arrokoth's surface may be rich in sugars formed abiotically from irradiated methanol ices ( Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2024, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2320215121 ). The color of Arrokoth's icy surface is a key clue that it's host to interesting chemistry. Frozen methanol has no color, says chemist Ralf Kaiser , lead investigator of the work. But after frozen methanol is exposed to ionizing radiation, it can take on a rainbow of hues. Kaiser simulated this evolution in his laboratory at the University