Slashdot Mirror
Worlds With Two Suns May Sport Black Plants
sciencehabit writes "If Tatooine were real, it would probably be filled with black plants and trees. A new study finds that, to maximize energy absorption for photosynthesis, the flora on worlds that orbit two suns may have evolved to use one or more types of light-absorbing pigments that absorb across a broad range of wavelengths, which would tend to make the plant appear black or gray. Although the idea that planets that could host such life may sound far-fetched, such orbs may not be so rare: The team's computer simulations indicate that Earth-like planets can exist in several types of stable orbits in multistar systems. More than one-fourth of the sunlike stars in our galaxy and about half of the long-lived but dim, cool stars called red dwarfs are found in solar systems containing two or more stars, the researchers note."
You mean like the plants on Gilligan's Island ?
Anyone else read this as "Worlds With Two Suns May Sport Black Pants?"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you have over-abundance of light, why would you need extra absorption?
Competition. If you have two species which coexist, and one of them develops the ability to make use of more of the spectrum, that species will reproduce faster, produce more biomass, whatever. The species which doesn't will be overrun.
The problem is that most of the stable orbits for a planet in a binary system result in very hot temperatures for part of it's orbit and freezing for the rest of the orbit.
1: planet orbits one of the two suns and is between two suns for part of orbit.
2: planet orbits both suns in a highly elliptical orbit taking it in and out of the 'goldilocks' zone where liquid water can exisit.
3: planet orbits both suns in a figure 8 orbit with similar results to #2
If BOTH suns are small and close together the planet could orbit both at a 'just right' distance to allow liquid water, but might be too close to the suns and be rotation locked with days and nights 1/2 a year long (like our moon).
The sky is blue because if it were white, we couldn't see the clouds.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There's no mention of how this would affect animal life. Skin tones and fur/feather coloring would be lighter to reflect more of the light, right?
"God does not play Minecraft with the world." - Albert Einstein
But absorption has to be balanced with water-retention and a host of other factors. If absorbing more of the spectrum is good, then why aren't all plants on earth black? The fact that we see them as green implies that they are reflecting back at least some of the spectrum (it turns out chlorophyll is surprisingly poor at absorbing green light).
The problem is that most of the stable orbits for a planet in a binary system result in very hot temperatures for part of it's orbit and freezing for the rest of the orbit.
So a lot like Canada then?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
In other words: it's not that simple.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Yes. It's unknown if life there will politely mock Americans, but given the dual nature of their system, a passive-aggressive attitude seems likely.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The amount of energy available is independent of the number of stars. Two colder suns or further away would easily provide less energy than one hotter or closer sun. Not to mention that having too much energy means the planet is a hot sterile rock (at least in terms of earth like biology).
If you're talking about a system with 2 very similar stars in terms of distance, length of day, intensity, etc.
But what if one star is dominant? At what point is it not worth harvesting light from the secondary star?
Rather than black plants that absorb a fuller range of frequencies, you might get 2 parallel evolutionary paths. Green trees would grow tall from the light of the large yellow star, while the underbrush would be full of red leafy ferns which absorb light from the smaller star.
The pigments are not very efficient: most of the light plants absorb ends up as heat. They have to reflect some of the light to avoid getting too hot and/or losing moisture too fast.
Give them another billion years and they'll have 90% efficient full-spectrum pigments plus a variable-reflectance surface that they can tune to control leaf temperature.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A new study finds that, to maximize energy absorption for photosynthesis, the flora on worlds that orbit two suns may have evolved to use one or more types of light-absorbing pigments that absorb across a broad range of wavelengths, which would tend to make the plant appear black or gray.
If that is true, why don't we have black plants here? If you had multiple types of light absorbing pigments in a plant here, that plant would capture more energy from the sun and be able to out compete other types of plants. It would stay well fed in all seasons and would be able to use that extra captured energy to make seeds and reproduce year round, not just once or twice a year like other plants.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If there's more light energy to be collected, maybe they have enough energy to be mobile. But then they wouldn't be plants, they'd be ents.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Evolution causes mother nature to be very efficient in her selection of characteristics. It might just be that green is useful to plants because it is the right wavelength for efficient photosynthesis with the sun's light. It might be green because it's much easier for plants to make green chloroplasts than other colors or because green imparts enough energy without overheating the leaf structure or its easier for plants to repair green proteins than other colors. If you read up on it a bit, you find out that green does not really maximize energy production, but it's apparently optimal for most plants. However, there's plenty of earth plants that aren't green! Surprisingly there's few black plants. We think too often about optimizing a single parameter. Usually that parameter is short term cash flow. The natural world is a more-or-less true form of capitalism and it's brutal but it shows us that short-term gain isn't the only thing worth maximizing and in nature there's no way to externalize costs for the long-term. Those that do, don't survive.
It would only be surprising how poor chlorophyll is at absorbing green light if it weren't green...
It's surprising because the peak of the sun's spectrum is in the green. So the plants ignore the strongest part of the spectrum. That is surprising.
Plants don't "maximize energy absorption for photosynthesis" on Earth so why leap to the assumption that they would elsewhere. In fact Green is just about the worst color (lets ignore white) they could use on Earth. And retinal exists and is much better than chlorophyll in terms of using the "right" part of the spectrum to get more energy from sunlight (though I think it's then less efficient at harnassing it).
And of course absorbing too much energy can be a bad thing, heat is an unavoidable product (the atronomers should know that at least, thermodnamics is pretty important to their field...).
Evolution does not produce perfection, it creeps toward local maximas in the fitness space - OK now the biologists can call me stupid :)
It's surprising because the peak of the sun's spectrum is in the green. So the plants ignore the strongest part of the spectrum. That is surprising.
There's nothing surprising here anywhere for people who have actually thought aout this. Please refrain from confusing your ignorance with some kind of general human lack of expectation of this very result.
- Some photosynthetic processes benefit from being executed as often as possible. They thus benefit from chemical processes that absorb in the red, because there are many more photons per wavelength interval in the red than in the green (as a matter of fact, in terms of photons per second per area per solid angle, the sun doe NOT peak in greeen. It peaks in the near-IR). Thus evolution drove towards an optimum of absorption in the red.
Some other photosynthetic processes need as much energy as possible. They thus benefit from absorption in the blue, since the energy per photon is higher in the blue than anywhere else that the atmosphere transmits.
There is thus no reason to expect any biological system to optimize for absorption in the green (other than for non-photosynthetic reasons like attracting insects or such). If the number of photon counts, absorb red; if the energy per photon is more important absorb blue. It would be a rather odd coincidence ever to find something as complex as a biosphere that just so happens to develop a chemistry where the two just so happen to be perfectly balanced in the middle AND is unable to develop more than one chemical pathway to make use of sunlight (photosynthesis has been re-re-re- discovered during evolution many times).
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.