The latest Scientific American has a article on what plant colors my look like under different suns. The first part of the article explains why our plants are the color that they are. The second part is also very interesting but no included here.
I thought some may be interested to add this knowledge to their understanding of gardening.
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The Color of Plants on Other Worlds Scientific American April 2008
pg. 48
The prospect of finding extraterrestrial life is no Ionger the domain of science fiction or UFO hunters. Rather than waiting for aliens to come to us, we are looking for them. We may not find technologically advanced civilizations, but we can look for the physical and chemical signs of fundamental life processes: ³bio-signatures.² Beyond the solar system, astronomers have discovered more than 200 worlds orbiting other stars, so-called extrasolar planets. Although we have not been able to tell whether these planets harbor life, it is only a matter of time now. Last July astronomers confirmed the presence of water vapor on an extrasolar planet by observing the passage of starlight through the planet¹s atmosphere. The world¹s space agencies are now developing telescopes that will search for signs of life on Earth-size planets by observing the planets¹ light spectra.
Photosynthesis, in particular, could produce very conspicuous biosignatures. How plausible is it for photosynthesis to arise on another planet? Very. On Earth, the process is so successful that it is the foundation for nearly all life. Although some organisms live off the heat and methane of oceanic hydrothermal vents, the rich ecosystems on the planet¹s surface all depend on sunlight.
Photosynthetic biosignatures could be of two kinds: biologically generated atmospheric gases such as oxygen and its product, ozone; and surface colors that indicate the presence of specialized pigmints such as green chlorophyll. The idea of looking for such pigments has a long history. A century ago astronomers sought to attribute the seasonal darkening of Mars to the growth of vegetation. They studied the spectrum of light reflected off the surface for signs of green plants. One difficulty with this strategy was evident to writer H. G. Wells, who imagined a different scenario in The War of the Worlds: ³The vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint.² Although we now know that Mars has no surface vegetation (the darkening is caused by dust storms), Wells was prescient in speculating that photosynthetic organisms on another planet might not be green.
Even Earth has a diversity of photosynthetic organisms besides green plants. Some land plants have red leaves, and underwater algae and photosynthetic bacteria come in a rainbow of colors. Purple bacteria soak up solar infrared radiation as well as visible light. So what will dominate on another planet? And how will we know when we see it? The answers depend on the details of how alien photosynthesis adapts to light from a parent of different type than our sun, filtered through an atmosphere that may not have the same composition as Earth¹s.
Harvesting Light
In trying to figure out how photosynthesis might operate other planets, the first step is to explain it on Earth. The energy spectrum of sun light at Earth¹s surface peaks in the blue-green, so scientists have long scratched their heads about why plants reflect green, thereby wasting what appears to be the best available light . The answer is that photosynthesis doesn¹t depend on the total amount of light energy but on the energy per photon and the number of photons that make up the light. Whereas blue photons carry more energy than red ones, the sun emits more of the red kind. Plants use blue photons for their quality and red photons for their quantity. Tin green photons that lie in between have neither the energy nor the numbers, so plants have adapted to absorb fewer of them.
The basic photosynthetic process, which fixes one carbon atom (obtained from carbon dioxide, CO2) into a simple sugar molecule, requires a minimum of eight photons. It takes one photon to split an oxygen-hydrogen bond in water H2O and thereby to obtain an electron for biochemical reactions. A total of four such bonds must be broken to create an oxygen molecule (O2). Each of those photons is matched by at least one additional photon for a second type of reaction to form the sugar. Each photon must have a minimum amount of energy to drive the reactions.
The way plants harvest sunlight is a marvel of nature. Photosynthetic pigments such as chlorophyll are not isolated molecules. They operate in a network like an array of antennas, each tuned to pick out photons of particular wavelengths. Chlorophyll preferentially absorbs red and blue light, and carotenoid pigments (which produce the vibrant reds and yellows of fall foliage) pick up a slightly different shade of blue. All this energy gets funneled to a special chlorophyll molecule at a chemical reaction center, which splits water and releases oxygen. The tunneling process is the key to which colors the pigments select. The complex of molecules at the reaction center can perform chemical reactions only if it receives a red photon or the equivalent amount of energy in some other form. To take advantage of blue photons, the antenna pigments work in concert to convert the high energy (from blue photons) to a lower energy (redder), like a series of step-down transformers that reduces the 100,000 volts of electric power lines to the 120 or 240 volts of a wall outlet. The process begins when a blue photon hits a blue-absorbing pigment and energizes one of the electrons in the molecule. When that electron drops back down to its original state, it releases this energy?but because of energy losses to heat and vibrations, it releases less energy than it absorbed.
The pigment molecule releases its energy not in the form of another photon but in the form of an electrical interaction with another pigment molecule that is able to absorb energy at that lower level. This pigment, in turn, releases an even lower amount of energy, and so the process continues until the original blue photon energy has been downgraded to red. The array of pigments can also convert cyan, green or yellow to red. The reaction center, as the receiving end of the cascade, adapts to absorb the lowest-energy available photons. On our planet¹s surface, red photons are both the most abundant and the lowest energy within the visible spectrum.
For underwater photosynthesizers, red photons are not necessarily the most abundant. Light niches change with depth because of filtering of light by water, by dissolved substances and by overlying organisms themselves. The result is a clear stratification of life-forms according to their mix of pigments. Organisms in lower water layers have pigments adapted to absorb the light colors left over by the layers above. For instance, algae and cyanobacteria have pigments known as phycobilins that harvest green and yellow photons. Nonoxygen producing (anoxygenic) bacteria have bacteriochlorophylls that absorb far-red and near-infrared light, which is all that penetrates to the murky depths.
Organisms adapted to low-light conditions tend to be slower-growing, because they have to put more effort into harvesting whatever light is available to them. At the planet¹s surface, where light is abundant, it would be disadvantageous for plants to manufacture extra pigments, so they are selective in their use of color. The same evolutionary principles would operate on other worlds.
Just as aquatic creatures have adapted to light filtered by water, land dwellers have adapted to light filtered by atmospheric gases. At the top of Earth¹s atmosphere, yellow photons (at wavelengths of 560 to 590 nanometers) are the most abundant kind. The number of photons drops off gradually with longer wavelength and steeply with shorter wavelength. As sunlight passes through the upper atmosphere, water vapor absorbs the infrared light in several wavelength ands beyond 700 nm. Oxygen produces absorption lines?narrow ranges of wavelengths that the gas blocks?at 687 and 761 nm. We all know that ozone (O3) in the stratosphere strongly absorbs the ultraviolet (UV). Less well known is that it also absorbs weakly across the visible range.
Putting it all together, our atmosphere demarcates windows through which radiation can make it to the planet¹s surface. The visible radiation window is defined at its blue edge by the drop-off in the intensity of short-wavelength photons emitted by the sun and by ozone absorption of UV. The red edge is defined by oxygen absorption lines. The peak in photon abundance is shifted from yellow to red (about 685 nm) by ozone¹s broad absorbance across the visible.
Plants are adapted to this spectrum, which is determined largely by oxygen?yet plants are what put the oxygen into the atmosphere to begin with. When early photosynthetic organisms first appeared on Earth, the atmosphere lacked oxygen, so they must have used different pigments from chlorophyll. Only over time as photosynthesis altered the atmospheric composition, did chlorophyll emerge as optimal.
The firm fossil evidence for photosynthesis dates to about 3.4 billion years ago (Ga), but earlier fossils exhibit signs of what could have been photosynthesis. Early photosynthesizers had to start out underwater, in part because water is a good solvent for biochemical reactions and in part because it provides protection against solar UV radiation?shielding that was essential in the absence of an atmospheric ozone layer. These earliest photosynthesizers were underwater bacteria that absorbed infrared photons. Their chemical reactions involved hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide or iron rather than water, so they did not produce oxygen gas. Oxygen-generating (oxygenic) photosynthesis by cyanobacteria in the oceans started 2.7 Ga. Oxygen levels and the ozone layer slowly built up, allowing red and brown algae to emerge. As shallower water became safe from UV, green algae evolved. They lacked phycobilins and were better adapted to the bright light in surface waters. Finally, plants descended from green algae emerged onto land? two billion years after oxygen had begun accumulating in the atmosphere.
And then the complexity of plant life exploded, from mosses and liverworts on the ground to vascular plants with tall canopies that capture more light and have special adaptations to particular climates. Conifer trees have conical crowns that capture light efficiently at high latitudes with low sun angles; shade-adapted plants have anthocyanin as a sunscreen against too much light. Green chlorophyll not only is well suited to the present composition of the atmosphere but also helps to sustain that composition?a virtuous cycle that keeps our planet green. It may be that another step of evolution will favor an organism that takes advantage of the shade underneath tree canopies, using the phycobilins that absorb green and yellow light. But the organisms on top are still likely to stay green.