Biopigments tagged posts

Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers search for signs of life beyond our planet.

Cornell researchers have created the first reflectance spectra—a color-coded key—of diverse, colorful microorganisms that live in the clouds floating above Earth’s surface. Astronomers don’t know if these bacteria exist elsewhere in the universe and in enough abundance to be detected by telescopes; on Earth they are not. But now, astronomers can use the color key in the search for life outside our world—making an exoplanet’s clouds, in addition to its surface and air, a promising realm for finding signs of life.

“There is a vibrant community of microorganisms in our atmosphere that...

The polarized light reflected from the leaf contains a footprint of the leaf’s biopigments. These biosignatures can be detected with a polarization filter, shown here as a pair of sunglasses. Credit: Illustration: Svetlana Berdyugina

Biopigments of plants, so-called biological photosynthetic pigments, leave behind unique traces in the light they reflect, an international team has discovered. The scientists studied these biosignatures with the help of polarization filters: If biopigments were present as a sign of life on a planet, they would leave behind a detectable polarized signature in the reflected light.

Eg Chlorophyll pigments in plant leaves, absorb blue to red light but reflect a small part of green in the visible spectrum and thus appear green...