Title:
The Planetary Environment for Prebiotic Chemistry

Abstract:
Recent laboratory studies of prebiotic chemistry are revolutionizing our understanding of the origin of life on Earth just as telescopes capable of searching for life elsewhere are coming online. I will share work at the intersection of these revolutions. I use radiative transfer and aqueous geochemistry models to derive new constraints on the pre-biotic terrestrial environment. I compare these environmental conditions to those required by proposed origin-of-life scenarios, and evaluate their plausibility. I compare the environmental conditions on prebiotic Earth to those on other potentially habitable worlds, and evaluate whether the prebiotic chemistry that may have lead to the origin of life on Earth could function on these worlds. In this seminar, I will explore 1) the initial conditions under which life emerged on Earth, 2) the inhabitability of planets orbiting M-dwarfs, and 3) the possibility of using exoplanet observations to empirically test proposed origin-of-li
fe scenarios.