NASA Discovers Potential Purple Alien Life on Rocky Exoplanets

NASA has observed a variety of Earth-like rocky worlds in the cosmos. But unlike our green planet, many of these worlds may be teeming with purple life – if life is out there at all.

It is easy to think of organisms in other places that are similar to the colors of the trees, algae, grass, and so on that dominate our Earthly reality.

This green life absorbs specific wavelengths of light from the sun to stimulate energy-generating photosynthesis, and the green pigmented chlorophyll compound helps drive this successful process.

However, new research from astrobiologists and microbiologists suggests that life elsewhere is likely to produce energy with different types of light from the sun, and use compounds with purple pigments, not it is green.

This is not a far-fetched idea. After all, some microbes on Earth are purple.

It’s just that on Earth, in our now oxygen-rich environment, green life (using “oxygen photosynthesis”) has come to dominate most ecosystems .

“But that doesn’t necessarily happen on other planets,” Lígia Fonseca Coelho, a microbiologist at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University who led the research, told Mashable.

The research was recently published in the peer-reviewed science journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The main goal is to show how space observatories can – and should – look for signs of purple life when they look at planets far beyond the sun, called exoplanets.

Powerful upcoming telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope in the high mountains of Chile and the Ordinary Earth Observatory (which orbits in space), will monitor distant world atmospheres and determine the composition and accommodation.

“Stop just looking at green. Look at purple too.”

The scientists took more than 20 purple bacteria from different ecosystems, such as lakes and swamps in Massachusetts and New York, measuring their living pigments and how they emit light.

Then, they simulated “light signatures” – the unique colors and chemical fingerprints that would be visible in the visible light of an alien planet – and found that these purple bacteria would produce clear, legible signatures recognized.

“Stop just looking at the green. “Also look at the purple one,” he urged Coelho. “We may be missing the signs of our lives because of our bias.”

Purple life may not just exist. It may even be common.