Purple creatures may be living on many other planets

American astrobiologists have identified the most common form of life we ​​can find on exoplanets .

According to Sci-News, a study from Cornell University and the University of Minnesota (USA) shows that a form of alien life that may be very common is a group of microorganisms that also exist on Earth: Bacteria . purple.

Instead of green, many bacteria on Earth contain purple pigments, and the purple worlds in which they predominate produce a distinctive signal that can be detected through spectroscopy.

The mysterious purple color appearing on exoplanets could be life itself, the same way the green color covers Earth's continents - (AI graphic image).

And if a group of aliens possessed telescopes as powerful as Earth's, they could identify that life signal.

This means that if we want to find a habitable planet among the 5,500 exoplanets - that is, planets in other star systems - that telescopes have identified , we will need to look for signs of other planets. bacteria are purple in their spectrum .

Dr. Lígia Fonseca Coelho from the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, said: ' Purple bacteria can thrive in a variety of conditions, making it one of the main candidates for life , possibly dominate many different worlds'.

According to Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of the Carl Sagan Institute, we need to create a database of potential signs of life to ensure telescopes do not miss them, especially life forms with a little bit of life. different from what we still see on earth.

To determine the type of life with the highest potential to inhabit exoplanets, the authors collected and cultured samples of more than 20 possible purple-sulfur, non-purple-sulfur bacteria. found in many different environments.

They are taken from shallow waters, shorelines and marshes to deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

What are collectively known as purple bacteria actually come in a variety of colors including yellow, orange, brown and red, due to the combination of purple and other pigments.

These purple bacteria thrive on low-energy red or infrared light using a simpler photosynthetic system than on chlorophyll like cyanobacteria and most plants on Earth.

These purple bacteria may have swarmed the early Earth before organisms evolved to photosynthesize the way they do today.

And they are especially well suited to the mysterious red glow of red dwarfs , which are the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy that contains Earth.

Additionally, simulations based on Earth's own history show that they have persisted strongly through our planet's periods as an ocean world, as an ice globe, and even in hypothetical scenarios as The Earth orbits a cooler star.

That shows these purple aliens have a lot of opportunity to reproduce on the 5,500 known human planets.

This interesting analysis was just published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.