Theoretical origin of life: UV light (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 12, 2023, 18:15 (347 days ago) @ David Turell

Is UV light important:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dwarf-star-light-origin-life

"A look at about 200 ultracool dwarf stars shows that they lack sufficient ultraviolet light intensity to have the potential to jump-start life, researchers report December 1 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. That may initially seem to be bad news for finding signs of alien life on distant planets. But the diminutive stars could instead serve as test beds to determine what other conditions can create the chemical foundations of life.

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For life to exist on a habitable planet, though, it must start somehow. One possibility is that UV starlight provides the energy needed to link together the hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and other atoms that make up the compounds that are precursors to life. [I would add phosphorous]

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"...overall, the UV energy the small stars release is too low to forge the chemicals needed to kick-start life, the team found.

"The dearth of UV light doesn’t necessarily quash hopes of finding life around such stars. “UV is an energy source for prebiotic chemistry that we can measure, and that is why we focused on it,” says Segura, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “But there are many other energy sources, like cosmic and stellar particles, and particles, radiation and heat produced by radioactive decay, to name a few.”

"Ultracool stars might be useful to discover whether something other than UV light can get life going. “We should search for life on the planets that have the least [UV] activity, where we can know with confidence that UV-driven prebiotic chemistry cannot happen,” says Paul Rimmer, a University of Cambridge astrophysicist who was not involved in the study. “If we find evidence of life on these [types of] planets, this will show that there are other paths to life.'”

Comment: this wishful article tells us the contribution of UV light to the origin of life is unknown, if at all useful. Biochemical studies never use UV light now. I reviewed the literature on Google. Nothing but sheer speculation. More grasping at straws.