Prebiotic Chemistry, Exoplanets and Stellar Flaring

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• Lukas Rossmanith
• Tuesday 03 June 2025, 11:15-12:00
• Martin Ryle Seminar Room, Kavli Institute.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact David Buscher.

Nitroprusside is an important prebiotic molecule, thought to contribute to reaction pathways that lead to the production of amino acid chains (Mariani et al. [2018]). Nitroprusside can be made from Ferrocyanide photochemically. It has been found that the timescales for this reaction on Early Earth would have been between an order of days to months , making this route of abiotic production very useful in further prebiotic reaction networks and an important factor to consider when discussing the viability of life to evolve on a planet (Rimmer et al. [2021]). Here we investigate this reaction with a focus on constant and time varied radiation, meaning experimental runs involving the sample being subjected to a constant flux of UV light and runs with UV flux changing over time. FlareLab makes use of a broad band UV-Vis Laser Driven Light Source (LDLS), to experimentally simulate stellar irradiation and stellar flaring activity. The reasoning behind investigating flares is based on recent findings that have shown that M-dwarves are prone to flaring (G¨unther et al. [2020]). Flaring for M-dwarves is also shown to be the best way to get enough UV to an exoplanet’s surface for good yield of photochemical products (Ranjan et al. [2017]). With M-dwarves seen as the best stars to look at to detect small rocky planets, it is important to consider how flaring could effect the production of Nitroprusside and if there’s a discrepancy between assuming a constant irradiation of the surface or taking into account flaring.

We show that FlareLab can be used as a means of detecting the production of Nitroprusside in-situ during the irradiation period. We also compare the constant flux and variable flux regimes, and discuss the implications of these findings.

This talk is part of the Hills Coffee Talks series.

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