The Color of Alien Plants

March 25, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice

The April 2008 issue of Scientific American features an article by Nancy Kiang of NAI’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory Team based on her studies predicting the colors of plants on other worlds. The studies, published in Astrobiology in February 2007, consider that as photosynthesis on Earth produces the primary signatures of life that can be detected astronomically at the global scale, a strong focus of the search for extrasolar life will be photosynthesis, particularly photosynthesis that has evolved with a different parent star. Depending on the nature of the star, such extrasolar photosyntesis may have adapted to spectra of light quite different than our own Sun’s spectrum, resulting in plants of varying colors.

Source: [Scientific American]