{"id":99072,"date":"2020-05-02T13:06:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T17:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=99072"},"modified":"2020-05-02T13:05:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T17:05:25","slug":"non-green-plants-on-extrasolar-planets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=99072","title":{"rendered":"Non-green Plants on Extrasolar Planets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Doug Cummings created this graphic showing what foliage colors on another world could look like. (Doug Cummings\/Caltech\/NASA)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Autumn foliage colors throughout the year? Many science fiction films depict foliation as being green. However, studies on plants have shown that the nature of the sunlight that reaches a plant influences that plant’s color.<\/p>\n

On earth, for example, plants photosynthesize mostly on red and on blue light. They also use some of the green light. Then, most of the green light is reflected. What if the host star is red? If the plants on the habitable planet photosynthesize on visible light, then the red light would be used for photosynthesis. Scientists theorize that plants would mostly be black in this scenario.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the coin, they also theorize that plants on planets orbiting bright blue stars might use all the blue light to photosynthesize. They would reflect the other colors. So, forests could theoretically consist of trees in different shades of red, orange, yellow, and green throughout the year.<\/p>\n

From NASA.gov:<\/span><\/p>\n

Kiang and her colleagues calculated what the stellar light would look like at the surface of Earth-like planets whose atmospheric chemistry is consistent with the different types of stars they orbit. By looking at the changes in that light through different atmospheres, researchers identified colors that would be most favorable for photosynthesis on other planets. This new research narrows the range of colors that scientists would expect to see when photosynthesis is occurring on extrasolar planets. Each planet will have different dominant colors for photosynthesis, based on the planet’s atmosphere where the most light reaches the planet’s surface. The dominant photosynthesis might even be in the infrared.<\/p>\n

“This work will help guide designs for future space telescopes that will study extrasolar planets, to see if they are habitable, and could have alien plants,” said Victoria Meadows, an astronomer who heads the VPL. The VPL team is using a suite of computer models to simulate Earth-size planets and their light spectra as space telescopes would see them. The scientists’ goal is to discover the likely range of habitable planets around other stars and to find out how these planets might appear to future planet-finding missions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If plants use infrared for photosynthesis, and they reject all visible light, then we have the potential of a forest consisting of trees and other plants that are each dominantly red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and other visible colors.<\/p>\n

NASA has the full details for this article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Autumn foliage colors throughout the year? Many science fiction films depict foliation as being green. However, studies on plants have shown that the nature of the sunlight that reaches a plant influences that plant’s color. On earth, for example, plants photosynthesize mostly on red and on blue light. They also use some of the green […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nasa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-pLW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}