Scientists know enough about exoplanets to speculate about how simple plants might arise on them. But don't count on them being green.
likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky Way, those worlds and the stars they circle could be completely different than our own. Extraterrestrial flora could be nothing like we’ve ever seen before., the most abundant type of star in the galaxy. They give off fainter, redder light than the sun.
They concluded that organisms with extremely efficient antennae could indeed absorb dim light redder than 700 nm, but that oxygenic photosynthesis might be a struggle. In that scenario, organisms would have to invest lots of their energy just to keep the photosynthetic machinery running. Evolutionarily, this might limit them to remaining, say, pond-dwelling green-blue bacteria, not structures that could colonize land.
If these scientists are correct that botanical life could arise in red dwarf systems, astronomers then need to figure out where to point their telescopes to find it. To start, scientists typically focus on thearound each star, also sometimes called a “Goldilocks” region because it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water on a planet’s surface.
A combination of carbon dioxide and methane would be a prime example, since both can be given off by life forms, and methane doesn’t last long unless it’s constantly being produced, such as from the decomposition of plant matter by bacteria. But that’s no smoking gun: Carbon and methane could just as well be produced by a lifeless, volcanically active world.
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