Astrobiology aims to understand the fundamental nature of life of Earth and the possibility of

life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiology is inherently multidisciplinary. Astrobiology is the

study of the origin, distribution, and evolution (past and present)
Stromatolites: These microbial ecosystems scrub CO2 out of the environment and turn it into
the mineral calcium carbonate.

What is astrobiology?
Astrobiology is a field of science that is highly interdisciplinary. Here it comes when we're
dealing with geology, chemistry, physics, and all sorts of biology to ask fundamental questions
about the nature of life on Earth. And is life just here on Earth? Or are there other worlds that
could support life? So, astrobiology, at its core, is the study of the origin, distribution, and
Evolution of the past. How did we get to be? And also, where are we going in the future
Evolution of life on the planet?

Modern History of Astrobiology

New name - Old field
NASA Chief (Dan Goldin) took the lead role in creating the new interdisciplinary field
1996 - congressional appropriations for NASA Astrobiology (ALH84001)
1998 - NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was formed NAI Road map the specific research
goals of Astrobiology
Although astrobiology is a new name, but the field goes back many decades. It was in the 1990s
when the NASA Chief, “Dan Goldin”, took the lead in creating this very new interdisciplinary
field. And a very special rock made all this possible; it was called ALH 84001. It was found in
Allen Hills, hence the name, and Antarctica. And what was so unusual about this rock was that it
was a meteorite from Mars. And when they were doing the analysis, everyone agreed that it was
from Mars; they could take little atmospheric samples, and we'll hear about this a little more this
semester. So, it got everyone interested, it got everyone curious. Actually, Congress approved
some money to help build what was called the NASA Astrobiology Program, or NASA
Astrobiology Institute, a couple of years later, and these looked at fundamental questions in the
field of astrobiology. It started the first roadmap of astrobiology.

NAI Astrobiology Strategic Plan

Goal 1. Understand the nature and distribution of habitable
environments in the Universe
Goal 2. Explore for past or present habitable environments,
prebiotic chemistry and signs of life elsewhere in the solar
system.
Goal 3. Understand how life emerges from the cosmic and
planetary precursors
Goal 4. Understand how past life on Earth interacted with its
changing planetary and Solar System environment.
Goal 5. Understand the evolutionary mechanisms and
environmental limits of life
Goal 6. Understand the principles that will shape the
future of life, both on Earth and beyond
Goal 7. determine how to recognize signature of life on
other worlds and on the early Earth

What would you think science is?

Science is the derivation of the word Scientia, which means knowledge. It's, the search for
knowledge and the search for quote, unquote, truth.

Two forms of science:

1) discovery science; it'd be awesome to send a probe to an exoplanet to study in more depth or
send an astronaut to Jupiter, one of Jupiter's moons, to research. But, of course, as humans, we're
very limited in our capacity to travel beyond our biosphere. So, we sometimes have to rely on
Discovery Science. We can develop hypotheses, but we're just observing, taking the data, and
then understanding what we see backward.

2)hypothesis-driven science, where you develop a hypothesis first and then design the
experiment to test that. For example, look at planet formation or star formation, that's going to be
a hard experiment to do. You can maybe do it with computer modeling, but it's going to be a
very long experiment if you're going to.

NB: there's no absolute truth. In science, you could do an experiment 1000 times and 999 times
and get the same answer, but that one time, something, you know, different happens. So, we kind
of treated it as dogma. But we always have to keep the back of our mind that this is the best
working hypothesis or the best working theory to explain the phenomenon we're going after. And
always acknowledge, there could be a new experiment, a new data, a new technology that is
better, more sensitive, that could change or up and that dogma. So, we always just have to keep
that in the back of our mind. But basically, here's the timeline here, right?
Someone makes an observation. And then you're going to ask questions. For example: how does
this star form we're going to ask that question is, is how do we then go about, you know, testing
that? Well, we could create a hypothesis, I think that gravity stars formed by, gravitational
disruptions, or something like that. And then you can make a prediction, maybe you can design a
model or some other experiment that either supports your prediction, or as in most cases with
science, I know in my science anyway, that prediction or that observation, or that experiment,
doesn't support the hypothesis, and I have to go back to the starting ground. And we keep doing
this loop until we start to get an experiment that can actually get at that question, or a result that
either supports or refutes and you just go right back to the starting process. So we're doing
constantly I've been for 30 years I've been stuck in these loops, trying to Understand my science.
And it's just an important lesson to not get too attached to your ideas or your thoughts or your
predictions, because you might just be proved wrong. And, and I think the true growth of a
scientist is someone that can be passionate about their work, but not so close minded that they
can't see, you know, oh, well, all of a sudden, someone new came along and proved me wrong.
And hopefully you can deal with that. And, you know, revise your experiments. But, but for the
most part, I think the process this is the best process I know of, to, to get at these kinds of
questions. So, keep at it, you little scientists out there.

Science versus Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience - is any body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be

scientific but does NOT follow the scientific method.

Identifying pseudoscience

• use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims

• over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation

• lack of openness to testing by other experts

• lack of progress
• personalization of issues

Pseudoscience:
pseudoscience is basically any body of knowledge, methodology, belief or practice that claims to
be scientific. But it is not following that method that we just said, they're not doing experiments,
or they're not validating their hypothesis. And they're not actually following through with the test
experiments are additional observations. One of the big things is the use of vague or exaggerated
or untested claims.

another area of kind of pseudoscience is when they over rely on what I call over reliance on
confirmation, rather than repudiation.

What are the critical thinking skills needed to be a successful

scientist?
Cognitive Skills: Formulating clear concise questions, developing a testable hypothesis,
Predicting the experimental results, Following an experimental protocol

Analytical Skills: Collecting and organizing data in a systematic fashion, presenting data in
appropriate forms (graphs, tables figures), Assessing the validity of the data, drawing appropriate
conclusions based on the results

Video # 2
The formation of the Universe.
The Universe is the sum of all the matter in energy. A few things that we know about the
Universe is that we think it's flat and membrane like and appears to be expanding.

Edward Hubble, that's a name you might recognize as the Hubble telescope was named after
him. Hubble realized that the Universe was expanding.

All galaxies, except for a couple really close ones are moving away from the Milky Way galaxy.
And the further away they move, the faster they're moving. So, if the galaxies are moving farther
apart than at some point, they must have been closer together. This idea that the expansion of the
Universe applies a precise moment of the beginning was put forth by an astronomer and Catholic
priests George Lemaitre.

The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory is supported by two lines of evidence. The first is that we've detected
radiation leftover from this big bang event, cosmic microwave background radiation. And
second, backwards calculations of the Big Bang from the beginning enable us to determine the
temperature and density of the Universe in the past. Based on this prediction, and this predicted
temperature and density, we can make predictions of what the chemical composition of the
Universe should be.

According to the Big Bang calculations, the Universe should be made up of three fourths
hydrogen, and helium. So, the predictions and the observations that are strong are astronomers
give strongly support the Big Bang Theory. So we don't really know how big the Universe is
because we're limited by the length of time it takes for light to reach us. So again, the age of the
Universe limits how much of the Universe we can actually see because it takes light time to
travel to us. For example, if we look at a galaxy that is 1 billion light years away, we're seeing
how it looked 1 billion years ago. Now, suppose the Universe is 13 point 7 billion years old,
which is our current estimate for the age of the Universe, we can't possibly see anything that's
more than 13 point 7 billion light years away. So, our observable Universe becomes a limited by
the age of the Universe.

From Earth, we will never be able to see anything that's farther away than 13 point 7 billion
light years. But no, that doesn't put a limit on the size of the Universe. That's just what we can
see. We call it the observable Universe.

How do we know so much about the Universe? For example, how do we know that it's flat?
Well, a lot of what we know is because of the Wilkinson microwave and easier trophy probe, or
“WMAP” that was launched in 2001, from Cape Canaveral and in 2003. It provided the most
accurate age of the Universe at 13 Point 7 billion years old.

Now and easy trophy is the property of being directionally dependent. Something that is an
easier tropic may appear different or have different characteristic in different directions. For
example, if you own a pair of polarized sunglasses, then that's blocking some of the light because
if you hold the lens in one direction polarized light streams through whereas if you hold the lens
in another direction, the light is blocked. So this probe, essentially measured and mapped that
cosmic background radiation that we talked about, and it was able to see when we mapped it all
out that the Universe was flat a night.

Another major finding of this probe is that when they were mapping the radiation, there were
pockets of what we now call dark matter. In fact, the Universe appears to be only 4% matter. So
essentially, all the elements protons, hydrogen and helium, puppies and kittens and tables, all of
that makes up only 4% of the matter in the Universe. 22% of the Universe is thought to be dark
matter. And then there's the very mysterious dark energy which makes up the majority of the
Universe and it is completely unknown, but it appears to act to accelerate the expansion of the
Universe.

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)

Measure fluctuation in the cosmic microwave background
Universe is composed of: 73% dark energy, 23% dark matter,3.6 % intergalactic gas, 0.4% stars
4% matter

It was the observations of the Bullet Cluster with the Chandra telescope that helped elucidate the
presence of dark matter. we can see that in the Bullet Cluster. Dark matter was detected with the
telescope when it noticed two galaxies colliding. The galaxies passed right through each other,
but the gas crashed into each other. So, scientists thought it was the gas would be where the
greatest mass would be, and where gravity would be at its highest. But when they actually
measured or looked at the gravity within the galaxies, the mass of the galaxies couldn't account
for the mass that they were actually measuring. So, it was inferred that there was some sort of
discrepancy in the mass and a hypothesis was developed that maybe something else this dark
matter was there. And they started doing this across all sorts of different clusters. And mapping
of such events like these two galaxies colliding has found these dark matter clusters throughout
the Universe.

What is dark matter and dark energy?

Dark Matter doesn't emit light or radiation to detect it. So it's speculated that it's comprised of
what we call non baryonic particles. These are outermost particles like neutrinos, wimps, or
mottos, wimps stand for weakly interacting massive particles, or neutrinos, and much those are
massive, astrophysical Compact Halo objects. Both of these are hypothetical at this point in time.

Dark energy might actually be helping to accelerate the universe expansion. We think dark
matter might be responsible for kind of holding the Universe together, basically, to prevent all
these galaxies from spreading apart. We think that dark energy might be helping to pull apart the
Universe and accelerate the expansion. And it's this tug of war between dug dark matter and dark
energy that's going on within the Universe. But we have very little understanding of the
properties of what might be comprising either of these two phenomena. So now let's focus on
actual matter.
Stars
They're large balls of gas that meant a lot of energy, and are constantly losing their battle with
gravity. But there's roughly about 100 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. And there's
more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. The life and the death of the stars are
incredibly important for life to form, at least here on Earth. And again, much of what we know
has been because of observation with the Hubble telescope.

Our galaxies about 100,000 light years across. That's the distance it takes for light to travel in a
single year. 1 light year is 9,460,000,000,000 km.
speed of light = 2.998 x 10 8 m/s

The formation of stars: Which essentially start out as gas clouds.

NB: We would have to be traveling 11.2 kilometers per second in order to leave Earth orbit. And
whereas if you're trying to leave the moon, that's only 2.5 kilometers per second, due to the
difference in mass. However, the number I really want you to pay attention to on the slide is the
astronomical unit or one AU. Throughout the semester, I'll be saying 10 AU or something like
that. I want you to realize that it's the distance from the Sun to Earth, or 1.496 times 10 to the 8th
kilometers.

If you're going outside, and the light that's hitting you at any given moment, was emitted from
the sun about eight minutes ago, because it has to travel those many, many kilometers. So that's
pretty far but it's really nothing compared to the distances of the other stars and galaxies.
So essentially, through the materials in the stars are really just made up are physically and
chemically altered within the stars throughout the course of their lifetime and out their deaths.
Essentially, it's just manipulated helium and hydrogen essentially, to reiterate all the compounds
of organic molecules the all the necessary building blocks of life are made by stars.

All the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are generated through thermonuclear fusion.
So at the end of the star's life, the material is then returned to the interstellar medium. And the
interstellar medium is essentially a mixture of gas, which can be single atoms and molecules and
dust, dust is considered it anything up to a one micron, and that it permeates the entire galaxy.

In our own galaxy stars are constantly being born and are dying, and some of the deaths can be
quite violent. So sometimes when you look at a star, it's actually not a star, it might actually be a
stellar nursery where stars are born. We call those nebulae, which are here you can see a photo of
an Eagle Nebula, which is a star forming cloud. And another good example is the Orion
constellation. If you ever looked at Orion, spelt, the middle star is actually a nebula where stars
are being formed. However, what kicks off star formation is gravity.

Stellar formation:
Gravity is the force responsible for stellar formation. And the mass or the type of the material
that's present, really helps determine the type and the fate of that star.

Starts with a molecular cloud (MC): 99% gas and about 1% dust.

Gas composition:
If I'm asking you what the composition of the Universe is, we go back to the other slide, and we
talk about 4% matter, 22%, dark matter 74% dark energy. So all of this gas that we're talking
about now in a molecular cloud, is really all part of that 4% of matter. And most of the gases we
talked about before is predicted by the Big Bang Theory is 74%, hydrogen and 24%. Helium, the
remaining 1% Are all the heavier elements.

Stellar Nurseries
So a molecular cloud is vast. It is about 10 3 - 10 4 solar masses, extend outward 30 light years
and contain 1000 to 10,000 times the solar mass of our Sun. And you remember the mass of the
sun from our cocktail party page, and the stellar nurseries can generate thousands of stars over a
period of millions of years. So once you have the molecular cloud, then there's some sort of
trigger that starts the compression and clumping of the gas. This can be a shock wave triggered
by interstellar wind or maybe a supernova. And gravity causes the clumps to form what are
called protostars.

Protostar formation: Shock waves within the MC trigger compression and clumping of the gas
Gravity condenses local clumps to form protostars then eventually stars.

Three critical processes occur

1. as the cloud shrinks due to gravity it starts to spin

2. as the rate of spin increases the cloud flattens to a circumstellar disk angular momentum
3. near the cloud core the temperature rises as the cloud density and the pressure increases
When the temperature grows hot enough (2000-3000K) the core emits light

Note: only visible in the IR range

Several processes occur, which are denoted in this image as pink arrows. So the gravity is the
pink arrows here, compressing down on that gas. So first, as the cloud shrinks due to gravity, it
starts to spin, and the cloud will spin faster and faster. And at the same time, it's very similar to if
an ice skater if you've ever seen an ice skater put her hands his or her hands up, and then they
start to move faster and faster. That's called the conservation of angular momentum. And that
angular momentum causes the in falling of material inward. And that basically causes a
flattening and the formation of a circumstellar disk. And that rotates around the protostar
particles interact with each other, which causes them to lose energy and migrate inward. And as a
result, the matter is starting to accrete or coalesce into a protostar. And this is kind of actually
where planets come from.

Protostar to Star transformation

• After 1-10 million years the temperature in a low mass protostar reaches a few million K. At
that point thermonuclear fusion starts and converts H to He increased temperature stops the
gravitational collapse. Gravitational forces = thermal pressure. Now protostar becomes a main
sequence star.
The cloud flattens and because any particles that are not moving in this plane of rotation will
actually start to collide with each other. And gradually it forces all the gas and dust particles into
the same plane. So this disc forms during star formation and it readjusts by dumping material
into the central star core. And there's explosions going on, this can eject material, and it can form
a jet, so to speak from the top and the fourth and the bottom of the spinning disk, which you can
see here in this cartoon. So the temperature is now starting to increase because the as the cloud
shrinks, it's basically taking this gravitational potential energy, this compression, and it's
converting that into thermal energy. And half of the system's initial gravitation energy is
dispersed through radiation, while the other half is converted into heat. And it has to be actually
cold for this process to start, just to let you know, it has to be around 10 to 30 Kelvin, and room
temperature right now is 273 Kelvin. So it does have to be cold.

After a few 1000 years, these low mass protostars, that's anything less than four times our own
solar mass, they start to get to about 2000 to 3000 Kelvin, then the core starts to emit light,
although at this point, it's in the infrared range now. So after about one to 10 million years, the
temperature in a low mass star finally reaches a few million Kelvin again, it's the temperature
increase is due to the conversion of potential energy lost to the gravitational contraction of this
protostar into heat.

NB: if the center spins really fast, the spinning disk will split up and that will cause a binary star
system. And it's at this point when the star reaches a few million Kelvin where you start to have
thermonuclear fusion, and that starts to convert hydrogen to helium. Now as fusion is happening,
this is also causing an increase in temperature. And this starts to slow down that gravitational
collapse. So essentially, when the gravitational foreign forces are kind of balanced out by the
outward thermal pressure of thermonuclear fusion, it's at that point that we call a protostar a main
sequence star.

A main sequence star is when the primary source of energy is thermonuclear fusion inside the
core, pretty much everything that we're going to talk about is happening in the core of the star.
Now, the stage that a main sequence star is in is very much dependent on the luminosity, or the
energy emitted by that star per second. So as the star evolves or goes through its lifespan, so to
speak, the luminosity and the surface temperatures are changing, and star spent about 90% of
their lifespan in as a main sequence star.

NB: The mass of the star is the most important stellar parameter as it gives us a clue as to where
the star is, and its life stage, the greater the mass, the greater the temperature and luminosity, and
also a higher stellar mass actually implies a shorter lifespan, they kind of burn out a lot faster if
they're really big. Since it's hard to see stars, mass, stars are often classified based on their
brightness, color, and spectral type.

There’re nine different spectral types. Within each type, there's an additional distinction made
between the different spectral types going from zero to nine. Therefore, our son here, which is a
G to V is hotter than G seven, and B is hotter than an F star, and so forth. So this color, again,
integrates surface temperature, blue is hotter, and red is cooler. And as you can see, again, our
Sun is about halfway through this table here, which means it's about halfway through its
lifecycle. And a star is said to leave this main sequence pattern when it's run out of hydrogen.
How do we know how far away the stars are in luminosity and mass and so forth? And so
how do people figure this all out?
 For stars that are greater than 100 light years away, they actually use something called Safe and
variable pulsating stars. In 1912, an American astronomer named Henrietta leave it discovered a
way to measure the distance to stars by studying pulsating stars called safe tots.

Their pulsation is directly related to how bright they are. And you can actually measure the
pulsation period. So by measuring the pulsation period, you can actually get the emitted energy,
and then you can compare the emitted energy with what reaches Earth. So these stars are
extremely regular. But for most ours, things that are closer to 100 light years away, dates,
astronomers use what's called Stellar Parallax.

And that's what's district what's displayed in the slide here. So in order to calculate how far star
weighs, astronomers use this parallax method. So because of the earth revolution around the Sun
Star seem to shift their position against further stars.

So here's the star that you're in question. If you're looking if the Earth is over here, it's going to
look, it's going to have a different kind of wavelength or background. And if you're on this side,
looking at that, it's going to have another different kind of viewpoint or background. So you can
kind of get an idea of these two viewpoints here. And you can, depending on the distance of the
star, you can actually measure the angle of the stars. And parallax actually decreases with
distance, the farther away the star, the smaller this angle is going to be. So by knowing how
much is emitted, how much light is emitted, and how much arrives on Earth, you can actually
start to get these distances. And knowing the distance of a star, you can get information about the
luminosity and the mass of the object. Now let's talk a little bit about element formation in main
sequence stars. First, every star burns hydrogen to helium by one of two processes. stars with
less than one solar mass that is stars that get up to about 16 million Kelvin in their course, the
hydrogen reacts directly to form helium via what's called the proton to proton chain. And this is
what our son does. You can see in this little cartoon here that displayed that you start off with
four hydrogens here, and through various stages of thermonuclear fusion. You're left with helium
atom, and it gives off various stages of gamma ray radiation, neutrinos and so forth. Now more
massive stars, actually of which that have higher core temperatures favor what's called the
carbon nitrogen oxygen cycle. So essentially, a carbon atom is fusing with the hydrogen And
then that few fuses that nitrogen fuses with the hydrogen to form an oxygen molecule and so
forth. The larger stars contain much more carbon nitrogen atoms produce from previous
generations of stars. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we talk about the death of stars. As
the star gradually uses up hydrogen fuel and its core, it undergoes changes in the luminosity, the
radius and its temperature. Essentially, as the hydrogen gets used up, that decreases the outward
pressure. Remember, it started for nuclei, it took four nuclei to form one helium nucleus. So that
causes gravity to get the upper hand, and essentially, it causes the core to shrink. And that causes
an increase in core temperature, this then results in an acceleration of what hydrogen hydrogen is
left. And that causes more thermonuclear fusion more hydrogen to burn up. And that also causes
the outer layers of the star to increase in size because you having less gravitational pool by the
core, it increases the surface temperature and therefore the luminosity of the star. So for our Sun,
which is 4.6 billion years old, our son has increased its radius by about 6%. Its surface
temperature by 300 Kelvin, and its luminosity by 40%, because it's getting brighter, as the
hydrogen fuel is starting to burn up. And that's causing changes in luminosity, the radii, the
radius and the temperature. Now the relative faintness of the younger son has actually raised
concerns about the temperature and the habitability of the early Earth. We call this the faint
young son problem. And we're going to talk about that later in a lecture. But essentially, our Sun
is getting brighter over time. So now what happens when the fuel in the core becomes
exhausted? Well, it starts to burn the hydrogen actually in the shells surrounding the core. So you
can think of the these as onions, where there's lots and lots of layers. So now in the in the core,
all you have left is helium, this is the point where the star enters what's called the Red Giant
phase, it's it's, it's really the beginning of the death for the star. Again, the core is shrinking, but
the outer shells are expanding as it's entering the Red Giant phase again. So as the hydrogen shell
around the helium core burns, again, the core starts to increase temperature. And when it reaches
a critical level, then actually helium will start to fuse to form carbon and oxygen, the outer
hydrogen shells, they expand even further, because there's not a lot of gravity to hold everything
together. So the outer hydrogen is expanding, and eventually it'll dis dissipate or disperse into the
the surrounding space. So as the star core continues to shrink, then the final stages begin. For the
sun, it'll reach this stage in about 5 billion years, it'll enlarge and it will envelop mercury, and
Venus, and really just approach Earth's orbit, it will not be a good time to be on Earth, the Sun
will expand about 200 times and as it expands, again, it will lose mass because stellar wind will
be coming through and wiping away that outer hydrogen, however, long, long, long before this
happens, the sun is going to go through all those changes in luminosity and temperature and so
forth. So it will an Earth will not be habitable for much more beyond two to 3 billion years as
like habitable as we know it. So we if our species still around, hopefully, we can find ways to get
off this get out of the solar system before the Earth and the Sun die. Now as his death process
continues for low mass stars, they'll eventually form called what's called a white dwarf. This is
like our Sun, which essentially is an exposed StarCore. When the helium in the core is depleted,
then the helium in the outer shells start to go undergo nuclear fusion, and the star admits, it starts
to enter what's called a second red giant phase, this time it's helium instead of hydrogen. So as
this death process continues for low mass stars, they will eventually form what's called white
dwarf stages, which are essentially unexposed StarCore. So when the helium in the core is
depleted when it's all been burnt up through nuclear fusion, then actually helium in the outer
shell start to undergo nuclear fusion and the star enters what's called a second red giant phase,
this time the helium instead of hydrogen, and eventually the star will continue to lose mass and
the temperature will decrease to about 3000 Kelvin. The final stage stages are when all the outer
hydrogen and helium are shed and dissipated, which is often called the planetary nebula. And
you can see that in this photo, this Hubble photo here at the Cat's Eye Nebula, so all you're left
with is the core of it, again, and this is low mass stars, a core of carbon and oxygen. And a white
dwarf is pretty small. It's about the size of Earth, around 100,000 kilometers in diameter, so
they're very small. Now if there were only low mass stars, and there'd only be very few very light
elements out there in the Universe, and probably not all the ingredients we need for life. So it's
really the high mass stars that become very critical for the formation of heavier elements. And
it's also the death of these high mass stars. ours that help replenish the interstellar medium.
Now in high mass stars every stage of a new shell, you can think of it as an onion model here,
onion layers. So every shell there's red giant phases occurring, and you finally get a core that
reaches very hot temperatures around 600 million Kelvin, then you start to get carbon fusing, and
that will form oxygen neon sodium magnesium byproducts at a billion cavil that Kelvin, then
you start to get neon starting to fuse at 1.5 billion Kelvin, then you start have oxygen fusing to
form sulfur, and at 2.7 billion Kelvin at the core, the silicon starts to fuse, and then you have
have heavier elements being formed all the way up to iron. So once the core is at essentially all
iron, the star is really in faced with impending doom, no net energy will be given off, more
energy will be given off when iron nuclei fuse, it's kind of a dead end for the star. At this point,
we call it a super giant. It's an iron core surrounded by all these different elements shells, this
onion burning model at this point, it's at this point, when the core becomes all iron, it can't hold
up against gravity, and it collapses even more, it goes from being Earth size to the size of a city
gets very small. And the outer layers of the star start crashing into the core and it sends a
shockwave, which expands into a gigantic explosion, which we call supernova. Supernova are
massive, and they'll typically outshine the entire galaxies for several days or weeks. And it's that
shockwave of the supernova compressing regions of the interstellar surrounding interstellar
media. And that can actually trigger new star formation. This process is really a full cyclic event.
So the death of one star can actually lead to the formation of a new star. And this image here
presented in this corner of this slide, is actually a composite of an Australian radio telescope,
which is in red, the Hubble Telescope, which is in green, and the Shandra, telescope and blue. So
it's a real image showing you the many layers of a supernova explosion. So depending on how
much mass remains in the core, if it's less than three times the mass of our own Sun, it'll become
what's called a neutron star. But if it's greater than three masses of the sun, then it might actually
form a black hole. So as the shockwave is extending through all the layers, that's when you have
all the heavier elements heavier than height than iron start to form like uranium, and so forth. So
it's really the supernovas is where most of the heaviest elements get formed. In this next slide, I
just want to show you that all the heavier elements, anything greater than hydrogen, helium, are
essentially formed by thermonuclear fusion and stars. And this graph is just to show you the
relative abundance of elements distributed within the Milky Way. As you notice, the most
common elements over here are things like carbon, oxygen, magnesium, sulfur, iron, these are
very common elements associated with organic molecules. And as you see, they're very in high
abundance throughout the galaxy, obviously, from this thermonuclear fusion and stars. So now
let's briefly talk about planet formation. And this is a very cursory overview of planet formation
to basically show you how having large gas planets in your solar system can actually help to
bring stability to a solar system, which is nice. It's nice to have a big brother Jupiter to take all
those bombardments from asteroids and so forth to protect us. But as you see, in this little
cartoon, which is not drawn to scale, we have four rocky planets here, very close, only about
from point four to 1.5 astronomical units from this from the sun, to gas giants Jupiter and Saturn,
and to ice giant planets, Uranus and Neptune and several dwarf planets. Eris here got a new
name, it used to be called Xena, and it now has a new name. And Pluto, of course, was demoted
a few years back to basically dwarf planet status. And that makes sense because the orbit it really
does suggest that Pluto might actually be a Kuiper Belt object and we'll talk about that later in
the semester. But the rocky planets consists mainly of nickel iron cores with silicate rocky
mantle's and cross they can vary in atmospheric composition, rotation rates, whether they have a
magnetic field or not. We'll talk a little bit more about that in another lecture. The gas giants
consist mainly of hydrogen and helium. Saturn has a rocky core about 10 times to the core alone
is 10 times the Earth's mass and there's some debate about whether Jupiter has a core or not the
ice giants, which includes Uranus and Neptune consists mostly of water, ammonia and methane.
And they do have rocky materials with a thin hydrogen helium atmosphere. The smaller dwarf
planets are again thought to be remnants either from the asteroid belt here like series, or Kuiper
Belt objects, including Pluto. So for planet formation, let's first talk about rocky planet formation
of what we call terrestrial planets, the planets formed from a disk of gas and dust called the solar
nebula. I know that's a bit confusion because we talked about the planetary nebula in star
formation. But now we're talking about the solar nebula for planet formation, the gas and the
solar nebula will dissipate pretty much within the first one to 10 million years. That's the
timescale for gas giant formation is very early on in the lifecycle, and we'll talk about that in a
little bit later. But this timescale for rocky planet formation is longer it might take about 100
million years to form a rocky planet. And the four stages of terrestrial rocky planet formation are
that initially start with greens of ice and material. And this first stages volatiles like water and
methane, they form is ice in the outer regions, while the heavier materials like if there's an iron
silicate or something that actually goes to the center, you can actually think of this as kind of one
large centrifuge and all the heavier stuff is going to the middle. And these ice grains and
materials, they start to condense and they grow through various collisions. In stage two, you're
starting to get very big grains. They're growing to very larger size, kilometer size, and now we're
starting to call them planetesimals at this stage. And they're growing either by accretion, this is
more of like a piece by piece buildup of the small grains, or by actually gravitational collapse,
collapse. And this rapid coagulation of a large number of grains. In stage three, this is when you
start to get what's called oligarchic growth. These are processes when you're starting to form
what are called Planetary embryos, embryos, these are much larger bodies that have a much
heavier mass, again, that's resulting in greater gravity and surface area, and that results in more
collisions. At the end of the stage, there might be roughly 100 planetary embryos in this inner
solar system. As you can see, in this little cartoon here, where you're seeing these embryos kind
of forming by stage four, these collisions keep happening until there are fewer and fewer quote
unquote survivors that end up in very well separated orbits. In this last slide, we're going to talk a
little bit about how planets, how the gas giants form and how they can kind of move and cause
other planets to move. There's still some debate about exactly how the gas giants form in our
solar system. And there's two competing theories or models. The first is the core accretion model
in which planetary embryos and cold gas become trapped over long periods of time. Once a gas
envelope has mass kind of equals the core, then the process of accretion starts to speed up
basically, as it gets more mass that causes an increase in the formation. However, if the process
occurs too slowly, then the gas dissipates before you get this runaway accretion. And that's when
you end up with planets more like Neptune and Uranus. The second theory is called
fragmentation. And that's when the gas giants formed directly from the protoplanetary disk. And
it starts with some sort of gravitational instability, kind of like star formation we talked about
earlier, and some patch of gas collapses on itself. However, this model doesn't seem to make
planets anything smaller than Jupiter. So it can't be the whole entire story because obviously, we
have planets like Neptune and Uranus forming, but the presence of these larger gas giants can be
very protective of the smaller planets due to the larger size of you know, with having all this
nebula material will kind of crashing the planets like Saturn or Jupiter, thereby protecting the
smaller planets. And we still see this today. About 20 years ago, there was a comment that
Shoemaker Levy that crashed into Jupiter. So we still kind of have these, we still need our big
brothers, Jupiter and Saturn to kind of help us keep
our inner planet safe. One last note is please don't think that the solar system is stable, these gas
giants can migrate. And the outer gasp What happens is the outer gas of the gas giant can orbit
the star more slowly than the inner gas and this causes the planet's orbit to torque a little bit, and
that it can effectively slow down the planet and essentially be because the planet to spiral inward
to the host star. We see a lot of evidence from gas giant migration with exoplanet research, one
of the first extrasolar planets ever discovered was what we call a hot Jupiter. It was so close to
the host star and most astronomers think that the formation of a gas giant giant that close to the
star is physically impossible, because the temperature is too high for the solids to condense. So
it's possible that Jupiter are formed and then migrated inward to the inner part of the solar
system. These are again what we call hot Jupiters for exoplanet discovery. So it is possible that
Jupiter one day could spiral inward through the solar system. And it also can influence the orbit
of other giant other planets. For example, in a recent model called the Nice model, which
suggested that Uranus and Neptune actually formed much closer to the sun and were pushed
outward by the orbits of Jupiter And Saturn. Essentially they think that Uranus and Neptune
switched places and eventually their orbits settled in into the current position. So that's a little bit
about star formation and planet formation and thanks for listening

video # 3

In this lecture, we'll be talking about the planet illogical foundations for the origin of life. First, we'll
cover aspects regarding the origin of the moon, then a few essentials regarding the geology of the Earth,
a discussion about Earth's oceans. And then a brief review on isotopic dating is that's going to come up a
lot throughout the course and astrobiology. Now the study of the moon is called Celine ology. And
before the Apollo missions in which we sent humans to the moon, there were quite a few theories out
there to explain how the moon came to be. One theory was the Fisher theory put out in the 1870s 1878,
to be specific. And actually, this is one of the first scientific theories that took hold. And it was proposed
by George Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, who was also responsible for tracking the tides. Again,
George Darwin, not Charles. So Darwin, George Darwin proposed that the earth was spinning so much
faster than the sun's gravity that it actually pulled a piece of the earth out, that eventually became the
moon. Four years later, a researcher named Osman Fisher thought that he mapped the geography of the
Pacific Ocean and thought that maybe this was the site that the moon ripped away from. So this theory
was kind of well accepted into the 20th century. And then another theory came along, that became a
little bit more accepted. And this was put forth by Thomas Jefferson Jackson sea, and it's called the
capture theory, he thought the moon was actually a wandering planetary embryo, and then it was
captured by Earth's gravity. Another theory called the CO accretion theory by Edward Roche was called
was when the Earth and the Moon are formed side by side independently, and that the same processes
that form the Earth formed the moon and the same materials as well. But it wasn't really until the Apollo
missions where 800 pounds of moon rocks were back brought back and it's also the Soviet missions.
They were robotic missions, they were called the Luna. And they were also brought some rocks back.
But these is when the first real clues regarding the origin of the moon came to be. Now just a few facts
about the moon. It's a quarter of the size of the Earth, but it only has 1% of the mass. And isotopic data,
which we'll talk about later in the lecture suggests that the Moon and the Earth the same exact age
basing this on the moon rocks. So when they analyze these moon rocks, they found that the rocks looks
more like the Earth's mantle, because there was a lack of iron in the rocks. And the density of the rocks
also looks more like the mantle than the planet as a whole. So essentially, the elemental composition of
the moon looks more like if you heat it up Earth's crust to remove the volatiles and then kind of
reconstituted the remaining material. So this actually discounted the fission theory because it wasn't.
And when they started to do modeling, the Earth would have had to spin so fast for this to happen, it
probably wasn't stable. And so the computer modeling kind of debunked to that one. But the moon rock
analysis knocked out the CO accretion theory, because if it was forming side by side with the earth, then
there should be just as much iron in the moon rocks as in the earth rocks, and that wasn't the case. So it
seemed like we needed a new hypothesis to account for this geological information from the moon. So
one of the more recent ideas is called the giant impact hypothesis or the big whack hypothesis. And
there's some great YouTube videos of models on this if you want to explore that. Essentially, the current
idea is that during the early bombardment period of the solar system, this is the time when all those
printed planetary embryos and materials were crashing into each other. That's something about the size
of Mars slammed into the earth late into the accretion process. It essentially Sideswipe the earth in the
material that was released, then coleg coalesced and formed what is the moon, so the Earth would have
been a lot bigger than it is today, if it had not lost a significant portion of it, that then became the moon.
And again, the material that broke off during the impact accreted to form the moon. The cartoons that
you see here are actually taken from a computer modeling, suggesting that this would have really
started to happen very fast. So right now, this is the most currently widely accepted theory based on the
models, although there's very little direct evidence other than for what we see in the moon rocks. One
last thing about the Apollo missions, there still is a continuing experiment today that the astronauts
placed a series of large reflectors on the moon lasers bounce off the reflectors, and we can calculate the
distance of the moon from Earth. And the results are actually showing that the moon is kind of tugging
on the earth and that slowly causing a slowdown of Earth's orbit. And that means the the earth is kind of
moving away from the sun and also that the moon is slowly moving away from Earth. So eventually a
few 100 and and years, we might like lose the orbit of the moon might kind of become so far away.
There's a lot of direct evidence for this including the measurements from the Apollo 11 laser, lunar Laser
Ranging reflector. So when issue that's been coming up, or people have recently been focusing on
regarding the moon, and going back to the moon is there's a lot of ideas of floating around about a
moon base, and whether it's possible to make fuel on the moon and the moon could become a
launching platform for other exploration. So during all this talk, people started to become interested if
there was water on the moon. So for initially, a long time, it was assumed there was no water on the
moon, there actually wasn't water found in the moon rocks that came back, but people kind of thought
that was just contamination, they weren't really expecting to find water, so they thought it might just be
contamination or the plastic bags that were holding the rocks leaked or something like that. However, if
the big wack hypothesis is correct, then water should have started to form on the early Earth during that
ACOA Christian process. So the moon should have some water. And also when they measured the
isotopes of the water in the moon rocks, it was the exact same isotopic signature as what existed on the
earth. So it was really difficult to tell or if not impossible, to tell the difference between the water in the
Moon and the Earth again, that's why they thought they might have contamination. So recently, there's
been a few probes to learn more about the moon and to try to get more information about whether
there's water on the moon. One instrument called the M three, which is the NASA's Moon mineralogical
mapper, which is a spectrum spectrometer built by NASA to search for water by detecting the
electromagnetic radiation given off by different minerals on or just below the surface of the moon.
Unlike previous lunar spectrometers, it was very sensitive enough to detect this small presence of water.
This was coupled with the Shandra ion, I apologize if I've said that terribly. This is India's first ever Moon
probe and it was aimed at mapping the lunar surface and determining its mineral composition. The
orbiter ended only after about 14 months, but it got some interesting data. So while it was active, it
used the moon mineralogical mapper, the M three to detect wavelengths of light reflected off the
surface and that was able to indicate the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen. And that was a
telltale sign of either water or hydroxyl radicals. So that's suggested that there was water on the moon.
And then when the Cassini mission was on his way to Saturn, it also scan to the Moon and Earth Kind of
as like a little in house test. And they also found water or hydroxyl, they look very similar spectrally later
on, the Deep Impact observation project of the moon not only confirmed the presence of water or
hydroxyl on the lunar surface, but it also revealed that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at
least some quarter of the lunar day meaning there seems to be some cycling of water a little bit during
on the surface of the moon, and the rocks and the regolith that make up the lunar surface are about
45% Oxygen. So there's a lot of oxygen present that could potentially be used for making water. And the
next slide we see here a more recent mission that was called the lacrosse lunar crater Observation and
Sensing Satellite launched from Cape Canaveral in 2009. And this mission was sent a probe. And the
probe essentially slammed into the moon which generated a gigantic hole about 6200 feet across two
miles deep, and it kicked up about 24 gallons of water. And there was a orbiter part that was making the
observations and then that probe separated from that orbiter. And it targeted what's called the KBS
crater. And here's an image here up here of the of the crater where the impact occurred. So the orbiter
again, was reading the capturing this impact from the orbit and they found water hydrogen oxygen
levels that were potentially able to be mined. For future astronauts living on the moon to make their
own fuel and potential make their own oxygen. So how did all that water get there?

So According to one hypothesis, potentially charged ions could be carried from the Sun to the moon by
solar wind. And this would combine with all that oxygen that might be tied up in the rock surfaces to
form potentially water molecules. Lots of oxygen again seems to be tied up in various oxide minerals. So
there's enough material there that it could combine with the protons coming from solar wind. Another
mission in 1980 98 observed large amounts of hydrogen at the poles. This is very relevant because
wherever oxygen free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there's a high chance of finding water at those sites.
And various studies also suggested that this daily hydration and rehydration, rehydration of the of these,
this trace of water along the surface could actually cause the migration of these hydroxyl and hydrogen
molecules towards the poles where they could start to accumulate in cold traps. Especially if They were
shadowed, and crud craters and so forth. So, another hypothesis is essentially the waters leftover from
comet impacts. And if you look at the surface of the moon, you can see that a lot of meteorites and
comets have probably hit the surface of the moon. So that's a hypothesis that it's just leftover from
these impacts. Another hypothesis is that water might be seeping up to the surface from the interior.
But this is pretty controversial. So according to this model, water that has been there, since the
formation of the moon has slowly worked its way up to the lunar surface. And that's how they're, it's
being detected. So that's all we're going to talk about the moon, the moon likely never had any life on it.
But it does seem to be a good testing ground for technologies, and perhaps for humans to travel there
and address many space biology and physiological questions of developing a space habitats on the
moon. So a lot of people are very interested in the moon and its potential resources for fuel and
potential oxygen formation. So now I want to come back to Earth, so to speak, and go over some basic
geology ideas that you might have been introduced to a while ago. But for astrobiology, geology is really
critical in establishing whether a world might be habitable. So during the early formation of the Earth,
which is based on isotopic dating of meteorites, we think the earth is 4.6 billion years old. And in
geology here, you see that I've abbreviated billion years old, actually with G A. And that stands for Giga
annum. And that's just how geologists abbreviate billions of years you don't actually see BYU a very
often you see G A. So now I want to come back to the earth, so to speak, and go over some basic
geology ideas that you might have been introduced to a while ago. But for astrobiology, Geo, geology is
really critical in establishing whether our word worlds might be habitable. So during the early formation
of the Earth, which is based on isotopic dating, we think the earth is 4.6 billion years old. And if you look
at the slide here, you can actually see that I've abbreviated billions of years old with G, A. And that's
because geologists use the term Giga annum to reflect billions of years old, so you don't see BYOD. Too
often, you just see G A, and it was during this accretion period, here you can see this cartoon of the early
Earth, that the Earth became hot enough that the interior actually melted. And that caused most of the
iron to sink, which formed the core. And the next slide here, you can actually see from this cross section
of the Earth, there's actually six primary areas that we're going to talk about when we talk about the
Earth. The three that you're probably most familiar with is the core, the mantle here, and the crust.
There's about three other areas that we're going to talk about that we consider as regions of the earth,
the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the magnetosphere. Now heat is transferred from the core to
the crust using convection. Hotter rocks move towards the edges of the Earth where it cools and sinks
down to the core. Convection is absolutely critical for the habitability of Earth and that's going to come
up later in the semester. Essentially, it's critical for the cycling of nutrients. Now the crust is very brittle,
and it's broken into pieces. And these pieces move to the convection in the mantle, we call that plate
tectonics. And there's two types of oak crust, oceanic and continental, the continental crust can get up
to about 60 kilometers thick, whereas the oceanic crust is only about 10 kilometers thick. Sometimes it
can be thinner as well, the core is made up primarily of iron and nickel, we can see here in that cartoon.
And the mantle is made up primarily of sulfides oxides, where's the crust is made mainly made up of
oxide, the liquid outer layer of the core here, this there, so the core is completely liquid, the liquid outer
core and the solid, the inner core is actually solid. And we're going to show this, but the twisting motion
of this liquid outer core over the inner core as it rotates over the solid core, it helps remove heat
through this convection process. And it also generates a magnetic field, the magnetic field can
occasionally reverse polarity by a method that's not completely understood, but it gets imprinted in the
rocks into the criss cross material. And so it's known for some time that the magnetic field is apparently
weakening over time, and it might head for a polar reversal. So all your compasses will then point to the
South Pole rather than the North Pole. And we are overdue for one the last one was about 13,000 years
ago. So we know a lot about earth, of course, but what about our neighbors, our terrestrial neighbors
Mars and Venus. So just as we mentioned, the Earth has this outer liquid cool iron core and a solid inner
core. This might be the case for Mars as well. Mars is heavily influenced by the gravitational pull of the
sun. And this causes what's called a solid body tied it's Just like the Earth, the water tides, but it's
happening to the entire planet, and you get a bulge toward and away from the sun. So it's this tidal flux.
Again, similar to the concept of the tides on Earth. However, for Mars, this bulge is a lot smaller because
it's farther away from the sun, it's less than one centimeter. But by measuring this bulge in the
gravitational field, we can kind of determine essentially how flexible Mars is. And the size of the
measure tide is is large enough to suggest that a core of Mars might be partially liquid might not be
completely solid, so it's more like chocolate syrup instead of a totally liquid core. And a lot of this
information came from the Mars Global Surveyor. Now there's a similar condition on Venus, but
because things are much, much more geologically active on Venus, there's a lot of global recycling or
resurfacing events on Venus, that would have been very hard for life, if you're constantly being covered
with love all the time. So what isn't clear is whether there's any kind of plate tectonics on Venus, Venus,
it's not happening on Mars, but it could be happening potentially on Venus. So that's something that still
remains a question. And of course, plate tectonics we

think is incredibly important for nutrients to be cycled. When I say nutrients. It's more like mineralogical
nutrients. And that might be very important for habitability. So one of the most important components
to help protect the planet is our magnetic field. And again, the magnetic field is generated by the motion
of electrical charges, which you can kind of see in this cartoon here. And we call this the Dynamo effect.
And this is again, the liquid outer layer of the core. And the solid inner layer, this kind of twisting motion
of the core as it rotates over the solid core and removes heat again, through convection generates this
Dynamo effect or the magnetic field. So another important component to the magnetic field is this Van
Allen radiation belt. This is where particles can get trapped, in again, not hit the Earth and be in so we
get protected by all these charged protons and electrons that are coming from the sun. So together this
magnetic fields forms our Magneto sphere, which again keeps the solar wind out against solar wind are
just fast charged particles meaning ions and electrons. It's technically defined as the region above the
ionosphere in which the magnetic field has control over the motion of gases and fast particles and so
forth. So it's approximately 10 times the width of the Earth radii. Although this is just a cartoon here,
you can see how it's slightly distorted, because of the low solar wind that's coming in and slamming into
essentially, the magnetosphere. And this would have been extremely important for early life on earth
not to get fried by all the cosmic radiation and the charge particles coming in through space. So just a
couple more points or components to the magnetosphere. The bow shock is that kind of area, that
imaginary boundary layer that the solar wind is that is deflecting the solar wind, it's kind of like you
could think of it as like water on the bow of a ship, the plasma tail, the sheath here, that's basically the
tail, so to speak of the magnetosphere that's capturing a lot of the charged particles from the solar wind.
And again, the solar wind is a stream of ionized gases that are blowing outward from the Sun at about
400 kilometers per second. And again, the level of the wind depends on the solar activity. So it's
incredibly important to keep Europe for NASA keeps regular observations of the sun so that we can keep
track of the solar activity. And people have really only known about solar wind in the last 50 years. It was
discovered during the Explorer One which is a NASA mission, and also the lunar one and Luna two
missions of the Soviets. And if anyone has ever had a chance to see the northern or the southern lights,
the Aurora Borealis, and that's essentially you're watching the solar wind hit the Earth's magnetosphere
so I hope you all get a chance to see that in your lifetime. Now what about the other planets and moons
in the solar system? Do they have a magnetosphere? Well, Mercury and Jupiter's moon Ganymede do
appear to have weaker fields but they can't seem to trap plasma. So some of that will probably be
getting through to the moon surface to the planet or the moon surface. Mars seems to have a patchy
magnetic field suggesting that once upon a time, there might have been a global field on the the early
Mars, but that it has faded a bit. So in addition to the magnetosphere and various another important
element to the Earth is the oceans. And the origin of the Earth's ocean is still a little bit of a mystery. So
planet Earth is pretty much defined by the presence of water and abundant organic molecules and it's
not just what's on the surface. The amount of water that's actually cycling through the Earth's crust
might be about 20% of the current and ocean capacity. And in the past there might have been 10 to 50
times what we have on the surface. And one of the biggest clues to where the water comes from, is by
monitoring what's called the deuterium hydrogen ratio. And deuterium essentially is a hydrogen
molecule with an extra neutron. Deuterium, which we call, we call that heavy hydrogen is a stable
isotope of hydrogen. And we're going to talk more about isotopes later. But it's it's pretty much a very
low abundance compared to regular hydrogen. And we call that abundance, the SMO the standard
ocean mean water, that ratio of deuterium to a heart to normal water, hydrogen, and we that ratio was
about 150 450 parts per million. And the ratio is uniform throughout Earth's ocean. Again, it's called the
standard mean ocean water the small value, but small value seems to be only half of what we found in
common dice. So that suggests that comments are probably not where we get Earth's water from. So
again, where does all the water come from? Well, we have two theories, two competing theories. The
first is that water came from planetesimals from within one astronomical unit, this may not be very
likely because the closer that they get to the sun, they're going to burn off their their gases and their
volatiles. So even though there's more of them closer to the earth, at this point in time, during the early
Earth, they may not have had as much water so even again, even though there's a lots of these
planetesimals, they might have had only less than point zero 1% water by mass. So another people have
speculated it could be planetesimals coming from two to three astronomical units further away, they
might have had more water because they're not as close to the sun in the sun camp, don't burn it off.
These are things called carbonaceous chondrites. And they get carried on into the inner solar system by
Jupiter's gravity. And these carbonaceous chondrites have a lot more water maybe 1% or more by mass.
And so there's cut we're again during this early formation of the Earth, Mars, Earth Venus are getting
bombarded by these chondrites and computer models do suggest that during this the estimated heavy
bombardment period that most of the water could have come from this water supply. So even though
scenario two is a little bit more likely than the first option, there are problems with the story because if
carbonaceous chondrites are responsible for bringing so much of earth, water and so forth, then you
would think that the Earth elemental composition and mineral composition would resemble more like
asteroids. And the asteroids in the air should be similar, but they're not studies a deep earth rocks
suggest that only 5% of the Earth is made up of these carbonaceous chondrites. So there may be some
reshuffling of material that have have hid the existence of carbonaceous chondrites on Earth, maybe
through geological processing. But no hypothesis really is quite adequate yet to really talk about where
the oceans come from. But again, it shows getting back to the last lecture. If it really was we relied on all
these planetesimals that were flung into the inner solar system by Jupiter. That again suggests that if
you don't have something like Jupiter to help bring in this material, maybe it would have been harder for
life to form. So the bottom line is comments are probably not responsible for the water, but they could
have brought in some other materials like volatiles and carbon and more on that a little bit later. So now
the last major component of the Earth is the atmosphere. And it's very likely that Earth is on at least its
third atmosphere, probably maybe even more. But first, let's talk about what the primary and the
secondary atmosphere would have been like. The primary atmosphere was obtained during the Earth's
formation, by the direct gravitational accretion of gas that would have been hydrogen and helium from
the solar nebula. This is very similar to Jupiter, Jupiter has managed to keep its primary atmosphere of
helium and hydrogen because it's so big, but the rocky planets unfortunately are too small, Venus,
Mercury, Mars have all lost their original atmosphere because they're too small and that hydrogen and
helium just go off into space, they just don't have enough gravitational pull to hang on to them. The
Earth and its atmosphere were very hot at this time. So and molecules of hydrogen and helium are
moving really fast, especially when warm. So as they're moved, they might be bouncing into each other.
And because earth isn't big enough, they probably a lot of this early hydrogen, helium might have drifted
off into space. And also, just like the big whack hypothesis if if we're getting bombarded by material that
could actually blow off some of our atmosphere into space.

So a secondary atmosphere probably formed pretty quickly after the Earth formed. Now Earth is what
we call a secondary atmosphere and I'm kind of putting that in quote, air quotes here likely came from
the Earth itself.

There were a lot of volcanoes happening at this time many, many more today because Earth's crust was
still forming, and the volcanoes can release steam. And as the volcanoes erupt and impacts hit the
young earth volatiles are probably escaping and entering into the atmosphere. So volcanoes are
releasing not only water and gases, but they're also releasing carbon dioxide, ammonia, and carbon
dioxide then probably dissolved into the seawater. So the atmosphere might have vaporized and formed
multiple times. So who knows we might be on our seventh atmosphere at this point in time, but
eventually the earth, this heavy bombardment period ended because as material kind of slowly cleared
out, that would have ended the Earth would have cooled, and then you start getting oceans this is
probably we're talking like the Earth is a few 100 million years at this point in time. So in addition to the
earth degassing, there's also this again,

this heavy bombardment of meteorites happening. And so as we mentioned, the the impacts of these
carbonaceous chondrites can theoretically based on the deuterium hydrogen ratio match what's in the
ocean.

But they also could probably be bringing in a lot of volatile material as well. Comets However, even
though they don't have that deuterium hydrogen ratio that matches the water, they do have isotopic
ratios that match a lot of the noble gases on all the rocky planets, suggesting that maybe some materials
like noble gases could be coming from comets,

so meteorite. So even though the secondary atmosphere and a lot of this material was coming from the
Earth itself, comets and meteorite impacts could actually be also helping to form the atmosphere as
well.

So overall, the formation of the first or secondary atmosphere and the hydrosphere were probably very
intertwined. So now for the formation of the current atmosphere. As that co2 started to dissolve in the
oceans, eventually, life formed on the planet, we have evidence of life that goes back at least 3.7 billion
years ago. And a simple form of bacteria develops that eventually could live on the energy from the sun
through photosynthesis and carbon dioxide that probably happened a little bit later than the first life
forms. And basically, they're producing oxygen as a waste product. Thus, as oxygen starts to build up in
the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide levels continue to drop. So meanwhile, you have ammonia
molecules in the atmosphere that were broken apart by sunlight, leaving nitrogen and hydrogen in the
atmosphere, the hydrogen being the lightest element rose to the top of the atmosphere. And again, a
lot of that probably drifted off into space. So it was the cyanobacteria. And we'll talk more about that
later in the semester. Were really the first in my opinion, the major polluters of the planet, and they
essentially transform the planet, from a carbon dioxide reducing atmosphere to the more modern
atmosphere we see today. And in this slide here, this is just really an overview to see how the
atmosphere has changed throughout Earth's history, the skills are a bit different in the two graphs. And
even though the graphs are kind of saying the same thing, I think the graph on the left even though it's
in French here, really kind of gives you an idea of the rise of nitrogen and the decrease of carbon
dioxide, and also importantly, the rise of oxygen around two and a half billion years ago. So the rise of
oxygen didn't happen right away, it took a while before it had life had to evolve, that had the capacity to
convert co2 into oxygen. The left on the right excuse me also adds an element of water vapor. So you
can see how steamy and or water rich the atmosphere was in the past. And I also like this figure two
because it shows the four major eons of Earth's history, the head DN, which was very early on in the
formation of Earth, the archaean, which is where life first originated, the Proterozoic and the
Phanerozoic. And we'll talk more about the what are the major events that happen in these eons later.
But as you notice, oxygen kind of goes up and down. And oxygen wasn't a steady, steady rise. The one
on the left makes it look like it's steady. But there were a lot of ups and downs with oxygen that we'll
talk later. Now I want to spend a few minutes I'm sure you've gotten this in previous classes before but I
want to talk a little bit about the three major rock types that are incredibly important for the study of
astrobiology rocks really give you the clues about the environmental conditions under which it formed,
it can tell you about microbial activity, it can talk about climate change. So by looking at the fossil record
or the rock record, you doesn't even have to have a fossil in it, you can get important clues about the
environment.

So there's three major rock types. There's what's called igneous rock, which is molten rock magma that
has cooled and solidified things like the salt and granite that's more common up north and say New
England and so forth.

Another important rock type is metamorphic. This has been structurally altered by pressure, a heat, it's
not enough to melt it, but it's been re altered. And this is things like marble or slate

Sedimentary rock, which is most common in the United States, is actually made by sediments are made
by the erosion of igneous rocks. But that sediment can actually get compressed. And through pressure,
you can result in the formation of layers or strata. And we call that sedimentary rock rock that's been
kind of compressed. The compression of sediments things like cookina, sandstone, limestone, and 75%
of the Earth is covered in sedimentary rocks. It's really a sign of erosion and manipulation by the Earth
weathering patterns. Now in this slide, I just want you to see how these rock types can essentially
change between the different stages. As magma comes out of a volcano event, we call that lava lava,
essentially, magma on the surface of the planet. And as it cools and Crystal crystallizes here, in this
particular cartoon,

we call that igneous rock. Again, good examples is basalt. Or if you've ever been to the Big Island of
Hawaii, you can actually see new igneous rock being formed from the volcanoes. Igneous Rock becomes
weathered and eroded. Again, it can form sediments sediments, then can get compressed and
cemented, and we get what's called sedimentary rock. Again, a lot of floor most of Florida sedimentary
rock, for example, a good type of that is cookina, as we showed in the previous slide. Now if there's too
much pressure, and heat the that can cause the sedimentary rock to is partially melt just partially melt.
If it completely melts, then we call it igneous rock. If, again, if the metamorphic rock completely melts,
we it goes back to being magma, and then it can solidify and become igneous rock. But if it partially
melts, we call that metamorphic rock. So this cycle here, and you can have all sorts of different
combinations and so forth. But this rock cycling is so important that it's really essential for plate
tectonics, as well as the habitability of Earth as these minerals become cycled. And these different rock
types go through again, it's critical for plate tectonics. So in this slide, you can see some of the oldest
parts of the continental crust, which we call crayons. Here, a crayon is essentially an old but stable part
of the continental crust that has survived the merging and splitting of continents in the formation of
super contents. And it's at least 500 million years old. crayons are generally found in the interiors of
continents, what I mean is usually away from the coastlines and so forth, at least in the US. And
Creighton may extend to a depth of about 200 kilometers. So, whereas I said that the continental crust is
usually 60 kilometers, these things can be actually much deeper. And crayons are subdivided in
geographically into geological provinces, and each province is classified as an Archon proton or Tecton.
It seems like the geologists didn't connect with the chemists when they labeled the term proton. But
anyway, that's what they're called an Archon is basically a rock from the archaean era, they're older
than 2.5 billion years. And here's like a little graph wherever you see green, this is the oldest parts of the
of the continent left on earth, the protons, again, this is a geological proton consists of rock from the
middle Proterozoic era. And these are rocks are older than 1.6 billion years, and the tectons these are
rocks that there are kind of the youngest their rocks from the late Proterozoic, with ages between one
point 6,800,000,000 years old. So again, I hope you realize also that the continents were not in this
current position. This is just an overlay, obviously, on the current position of the continents, and the
continents, we're probably smaller. And we're definitely in different locations during the archaean, and
they've been moving through by plate tectonics. So overall, geology is so essential to understanding
what makes a planet habitable. Also, life has had a profound impact on geology, as well as the formation
of the earth were probably only a few 100 minerals present. But as life evolved and developed, they've
changed the atmosphere and so forth. Now there's 1000s of different minerals that wouldn't have
existed because of life. So these minerals, then can percent potentially serve as good biomarkers for
indicators of life and so forth. In this last section of the of the lecture, I want to cover some basics that
you might have had another classes, but it's really important to astrobiology and that's isotopic or
radiometric dating. Now we say the planet is 4.6 billion years old, or we found this ancient teapot that's
1000 years old or something like that. How do we know that? And it's really because elements have
different isotopes. Isotopes are variants of a particular element. While isotopes are of a given element
share the same number of protons. Each isotope differs from another and it's number of neutrons. So
early in the lecture, we talked about the deuterium hydrogen ratio. So in this case, a proteome is just a
hydrogen molecule with a single proton. If we're talking About deuterium that actually has a proton and
a neutron, and tritium has one proton but two neutrons, but that's not a stable form of hydrogen.
Anytime an isotope isn't stable, it wants to break down into a more stable form. All isotopes over the
atomic number of 83 are considered radioactive, meaning they aren't stable. So again, a radioactive
isotope is prone to spontaneous decay. There's alpha decay in which a helium nucleus is ejected, that's
two protons and two neutrons. There's beta decay, which you either emit or absorb a light and electron
and this decay occurs at a very specific and measurable rate. Now, carbon is probably the most common
radio isotope that you might have heard about in your classes and so forth, especially if you're taking
archeology or something. carbon isotopes are also incredibly important tools in astrobiology and
geochemistry. Carbon has two stable isotopes, there's carbon 12, in which there's six protons and six
neutrons. 98.9% of all carbon is this carbon 12 form. Then there's also carbon 13. This is six protons and
seven neutrons, and it's about 1.1% of all the carbon molecules. Carbon also has a radioactive form a
carbon 14, that's six protons and eight neutrons. And it's very rare. As you can see, with this percentage
with very a lot of zeros here, carbon 14 eventually decays to to nitrogen 14 through beta decay. And the
use of stable isotopes is very important. We're going to talk a little bit more about that when we when
we start getting into metabolism and so forth. Another elements that's used in radiometric dating you
might have heard about is Uranium, Uranium is always unstable, all uranium isotopes decay. So here's
another look at these types of radioactive decay. Again, an alpha decay event is when an alpha particle
which is essentially two protons or two neutrons are essentially a helium molecule, that's when that's
ejected. Beta decay is when the parent nucleus echecks, an electron or neutrino and becomes what we
call the daughter nucleus. A neutrino is essentially a weakly interacting subatomic particle particle, they
may have mass, but it's very hard to measure the mass of neutrinos. A third type is gamma decay. This is
when the nucleus is releasing electromagnetic radiation in the formation of photons, the number of
protons and neutrons in the nucleus doesn't change. So but it's they're releasing energy as these
photons. So in this next slide, we're starting to look at the decay of uranium. And this is taken directly
from your book. And just to let you know, I do sometimes use questions from the book on exams, and
the RE uranium here, the uranium 238, is actually decaying to OLED 206. And it goes through numerous
different alpha and beta decay events to eventually form this led to a six. So the probabilities, we can
determine this age, so the half life of a uranium 238 molecule turning into LED is 4.4 7 billion years old.
In other words, it would take 4.4 7 billion years for half of the uranium in a particular sample, to decay
to lead. So again, looking at the ratios of uranium to lead gives you the age or the of a rock or a
particular sample. And we can estimate based on the probabilities of A beta decay event or an alpha
decay event and so forth. Whereas in carbon 14, converting down to nitrogen 14, that only takes 5730
years. So depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you would choose the particular elements of
that fits that particular question that you're trying to address. And then this last chart here, we see,
again, what we call the parent isotope where what it starts as, and then the daughter isotope is the final
kind of product. These are common isotopes used in radiometric dating for geology. And here's the
halflife. So again, depending on the question that you're trying to address, you might pick uranium over
or you might pick aluminum over carbon, and so forth. So again, I strongly recommend that you read the
book sections assigned for these lectures as it will help reinforce many of the concepts. And again, the
page numbers can be found in your lecture schedule in Canvas. So until next time, undefined