EXOA8

Exploration of the solar system and astrophysics missions have revealed remarkable insights into the composition, chemistry, and biological potential of the giant planets, their moons and ring systems, smaller bodies beyond Neptune, the interstellar medium, and protoplanetary disks. Many of these bodies have become key targets for understanding the origins of life on Earth and other celestial objects. Increasingly sophisticated ground- and space-based instrumentation enables new observations and in situ measurements of these fascinating environments, which will facilitate novel chemical and biological investigations at the forefront of planetary science.

Carbon chemistry is ubiquitous in the dense interstellar medium, with chemical modelling, laboratory experiments, and astrophysical observations suggesting that the complex macro-molecular building blocks of life could be synthesised in ices under these conditions. Such material can be incorporated into planetesimals during their accretion, and planetary bodies can today play host to complex chemistry. This is significant across many aspects of exploration in the outer solar system, particularly in the potentially habitable satellites of the giant planets. The subsurface liquid water oceans of the moons Enceladus (the only extraterrestrial ocean to have been sampled) and Europa are likely habitable, whilst Titan could be a natural prebiotic laboratory. Clearly, the characterisation of these fascinating geochemical environments is critical to understand habitability and search for extraterrestrial life. The New Horizons mission and JWST observations have characterised the compositions of primitive Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs) in the farthest reaches of the solar system, enabling a direct comparison with the ices in protoplanetary disks that are the feedstock for carbonaceous molecules in extra-solar planetary systems.

This symposium will discuss our current understanding of chemistry and the emergence of life in the solar system and beyond, welcoming contributions related to icy ocean worlds, ring systems, comets, asteroids, surfaces, TNOs, protoplanetary disks, and the interstellar medium. Results derived from space mission data, detections of organic molecules via telescopic observations, laboratory experiments predicting or characterising chemical processes, and theoretical approaches including quantum chemistry and geochemical modelling are encouraged. We encourage submissions on biological, physicochemical, astrophysical, and paleontological studies of the living-matter origination problem, the conditions necessary and sufficient for living-matter origination and development, mechanisms of living-matter origination on the Earth and other celestial objects. Submissions on promising celestial objects for the living-matter occurrence, and other experimental, theoretical, and observational works related to the emergence and development of life in our Solar System and beyond are also welcomed.