Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 21, 2026

Conducting Miller-Urey Experiments
Published on: January 21, 2014
Astrobiology
1UK Centre for Astrobiology, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract:
Astrobiology aims not only to determine whether life exists beyond Earth but to understand how biology 'fits' into a physicochemical universe of stars and planets, including Earth itself. The field coalesced in the late twentieth century around a core of much older questions about the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Today, it is a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary collaboration that draws on many sources of data - from planetary missions and exoplanet surveys to field-based, experimental, computational and analytical methods in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and astronomy. A recurrent concern across many branches of astrobiology is the fuzziness of the boundaries between life and non-life as well as the difficulty of discriminating biological signals from an 'abiotic baseline'.
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