Can Lightning Trigger Life on Extraterrestrial Planets?

That is a question Dr. Christiane Helling and her team at the University of St Andrews are trying to answer. Her talk ‘Sparkling Clouds and Crackling Lightning in Extrasolar Planets’ at the University of Dundee will be about her research on the creation of lightning and its different properties on brown dwarfs (the universe’s inbetween objects, too big to be a planet, too small to be a star), gas giants and other planets beyond our solar system. The theory is that large-scale lightning discharges could have caused the formation of prebiotic molecules that created life on Earth.