Talk - Monday 31st January 9.15-10.00 on Zoom, questions 10.00-10.15 Speaker: Niels Ligterink, Space Research & Planetary Sciences, University of Bern, Switzerland Title: The molecular origin of life: From interstellar to planetary prebiotic chemistry Abstract: Life as we know it is built from molecules. Therefore, to understand how life originated, we need to understand how the first biomolecule building blocks formed. In this seminar, we will follow the prebiotic chemistry from star- and planet-forming regions to the planets and moons in our Solar System. With laboratory experiments and radio telescope observations, we will unravel the formation of some of these prebiotic molecules in space. We will see that star-forming regions are teeming with a large variety of prebiotic molecules and that many of these species are formed in the ice mantles of interstellar dust grains. The journey is continued to the Solar System, where we want to know if prebiotic molecules are present in the ice of Europa - a moon of Jupiter - or in the atmosphere of Venus, to help understand if these objects are habitable or perhaps even harbor life. For this purpose, we constructed the ORIGIN instrument, a Laser Desorption Mass Spectrometer for space exploration missions that can detect trace amounts of amino acids, lipids, and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). We will look at how this instruments operates and how it is implemented in space missions. Link to Zoom meeting: https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/67765919121