View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 224:9 (33pp), 2016 May doi:10.3847/0067-0049/224/1/9 © 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. A CHEMICAL KINETICS NETWORK FOR LIGHTNING AND LIFE IN PLANETARY ATMOSPHERES P. B. Rimmer and Ch Helling School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9SS, UK;
[email protected] Received 2015 June 3; accepted 2015 October 22; published 2016 May 23 ABSTRACT There are many open questions about prebiotic chemistry in both planetary and exoplanetary environments. The increasing number of known exoplanets and other ultra-cool, substellar objects has propelled the desire to detect life andprebiotic chemistry outside the solar system. We present an ion–neutral chemical network constructed from scratch, STAND2015, that treats hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistry accurately within a temperature range between 100 and 30,000 K. Formation pathways for glycine and other organic molecules are included. The network is complete up to H6C2N2O3. STAND2015 is successfully tested against atmospheric chemistry models for HD 209458b, Jupiter, and the present-day Earth using a simple one- dimensionalphotochemistry/diffusion code. Our results for the early Earth agree with those of Kasting for CO2,H2, CO, and O2, but do not agree for water and atomic oxygen. We use the network to simulate an experiment where varied chemical initial conditions are irradiated by UV light. The result from our simulation is that more glycine is produced when more ammonia and methane is present.