Alien life might be purple.

 

外星生命也许是紫色的。

 

That's the conclusion of a new research paper that suggests that the first life on Earth might have had a lavender hue¹. In the International Journal of Astrobiology, microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman at the University of California, Riverside, argue that before green plants started harnessing the power of the sun for energy, tiny purple organisms figured out a way to do the same.

 

Alien life could be thriving in the same way, DasSarma said.

 

"Astronomers² have discovered thousands of new extrasolar planets recently and are developing the capacity to see surface biosignatures" in the light reflected from these planets, he told Live Science. There are already ways to detect green life from space, he said, but scientists might need to start looking for purple, too. 

 

The idea that the early Earth was purple is not new, DasSarma and his colleagues advanced the theory in 2007. The thinking goes like this: Plants and photosynthesizing algae³ use chlorophyll to absorb energy from the sun, but they don't absorb green light. That's odd, because green light is energy-rich. Perhaps, DasSarma and his colleagues reasoned, something else was already using that part of the spectrum⁴ when chlorophyll photosynthesizers evolved.

 

That "something else" would be simple organisms that captured solar energy with a molecule⁵ called retinal. Retinal pigments⁶ absorb green light best. They're not as efficient as chlorophylls in capturing solar energy, but they are simpler, the researchers wrote in their new paper.

 

Retinal light-harvesting is still widespread today among bacteria and the single-celled organisms called Archaea. These purple organisms have been discovered everywhere from the oceans to the Antarctic Dry Valley to the surfaces of leaves, Schwieterman told Live Science. Retinal pigments are also found in the visual system of more complex animals.

 

The appearance of the pigments across many living organisms hints that they may have evolved very early on, in ancestors common to many branches of the tree of life, the researchers wrote. There is even some evidence that modern purple-pigmented salt-loving organisms called halophiles might be related to some of the earliest life on Earth, which thrived around methane⁷ vents⁸ in the ocean, Schwieterman said.

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