Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modeling Potential Chemical Environments: Implications For Astrobiology, Brian Craig Szenay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modeling chemical environments is an important step to understanding the diversity of prebiotic systems that may have formed on the early earth or potentially can occur on other worlds. By using the modern Earth as a test case, these models predict scenarios with systems more conducive to the formation of the organic molecules that are important to life. Here we use the equilibrium thermodynamic modeling program HSC Chem to investigate prebiotic environments. This program uses the raw material that the user inputs into the system in order to calculate the change in amounts of chemical species forming as a function …