Apparently astronomers have discovered that there’s a huge cloud of frozen sugar near the center of the Milky Way. It’s glycolaldehyde, a sugar composed of two carbon atoms, two oxygen atoms and four hydrogen atoms. No word on how tasty that stuff actually is, but given that it’s barely a few degrees above absolute zero, you wouldn’t really wanna lick it anyway. But outside of the extremely cool discovery of our galaxy’s Tootsie-Pop-like qualities, the researchers also surmise that a sugary cloud like this could help seed life — if a comet passed through it, grabbed of bunch of the stuff, then deposited it on a nice warm planet. As The Scotsman reports:

Radio astronomer Dr Jan Hollis, from the American space agency NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Green- belt, Maryland, said: “Many of the interstellar molecules discovered to date are the same kinds detected in laboratory experiments specifically designed to synthesise prebiotic molecules.

“This fact suggests a universal prebiotic chemistry.”