The Miller–Urey experiment, or Miller experiment, was an experiment in chemical synthesis carried out in 1952 that simulated the conditions thought at the time to be present in the atmosphere of the e
Portrait photograph of Alexander Oparin
Stanley Miller in 1999, posed with an apparatus like that used in the original experiment
The surface of Titan as viewed from the Huygens lander. Tholins, complex particles formed by UV irradiation on the N2 and CH4 atmosphere, are likely the source of the reddish haze.
Conceptual figure from Wogan et al. (2023) depicting three stages phases of atmospheric chemistry after a large asteroid impact on the Hadean Earth. In phase 1, the impactor vaporizes the ocean, and H2 is generated after iron delivered by the impactor reacts with hot steam. In phase 2, H2 reacts with CO2 to produce CH4 while the atmosphere cools for thousands of years and steam condenses to an ocean. Phase 3 represents the Miller–Urey atmosphere that persists for millions of years, where N
Primordial soup, also known as prebiotic soup and Haldane soup, is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago. It is an aspect of the heterotrophic the
Miller–Urey experiment
…gene with catalytic and autoreplicative properties could have set evolution in motion. Around the same time, Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's "Primordial soup" ideas were emerging, which hypothesized that a chemically-reducing atmosphere on early Earth would have been conducive to organic synthesis in the…