New study suggests that extraterrestrial life could be purple !!!

As life on Earth could have a purple hue, scientists proposed in a recent study that extraterrestrial life could also be purple.

It is likely that extraterrestrial life could be purple, at least according to a new study published in the International Journal of Astrobiology by postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman of the University of California, Riverside, and by microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma from the Medical School of the University of Maryland.

As Live Science reports, the Earth's youth may have had a lavender hue as these purple organisms gradually discovered that they could create energy by harnessing the power of the sun long before green plants can not find the way to do the same. In this sense, DasSarma thinks that extraterrestrial life could do exactly the same thing elsewhere.

Researchers have already discovered different ways to detect green living from space, and DasSarma believes that researchers must also begin to focus on purple organisms. The proposals that life on Earth is purple at the very beginning of the planet are not really a new case. DasSarma and his team then proposed this hypothesis in 2007, which led them to anticipate that the same thing could be valid for extraterrestrial life, with chances also that it is violet.

The reason behind this statement is extremely simple. The photosynthesis of algae and plants harnesses the energy of the sun using chlorophyll, but the green light is not absorbed. Since the green light is particularly energy-rich, DasSarma and his team found it strange, thinking that maybe when the chlorophyll synthesizers started to evolve, it's possible that something else could have used this part of the visible spectrum when chlorophyll photosynthesis has evolved.

Unicellular organisms, also called Archaea, and microbes still use the capture of light by the retina today. These purple organisms are so prevalent on Earth that they have been found everywhere, from oceans to leaf surfaces, and even in the dry Antarctic valley. . These retinal pigments are also used by much more complex organisms, and the discovery that these pigments are so common in various organisms suggests that their evolution probably began very early on Earth.

Be that as it may, DasSarma and Schwieterman believe that purple organisms work quite well, implying that purple extraterrestrial life could also flourish elsewhere. And if this is the case, and if these extraterrestrial organisms use retinal pigments to harness their energy, astrobiologists should be able to find them only by searching for the correct light signatures.

As Schwieterman explains, "If these organisms were present in adequate densities on an exoplanet, these reflective properties would be etched into the spectrum of reflected light from this planet".

Publish views:
64