The Fascinating World of Kepler 186f

[toler]

I don’t think this is right. Hear me out.

I’m confused. If the star is emitting red light, why would the plants want to reflect red light into our eyes? It’s not like earth plants are yellow or orange all over due to our sun. An objects color is based on the part of the light/color spectrum the object could *not* absorb and instead reflects/emits it into our eyes. A red sun making a red planet really sounds counterproductive for the plants. Why would you want to reflect the highest energy source around, red light?

To take is further, Chlorophyll shows green light because in the light spectrum the green light has a high frequency, high energy, fast photon. And so it spreads more diffusely through the cell wall. Chlorophyll easily absorbs red and blue light because they are lower energy. As evolution builds itself up from simplistic means, plants more easily adapt the tools to absorb long slow calm (and delicious) red wavelength into its cells.
Something else I was thinking was that under this red sun, the plants will likely adapt to the largest energy source (like ours did, through competition) and function to focus on the absorption of red light as it is abundant.

This is where it gets a little more interesting.
All the plants are getting lit up by a different color light source too! The planet has a “red filter on” so to speak. Have you ever shined a red light on a green object? It looks gray. The plants might look gray to our eyes, but if we switched the suns out, we’d see greenish plants again, because the filter changed.

It gets a little crazier and stupider than that 😋. Any animal life that evolved on that red sunned planet might adapt to a different visual response than we do! Where we see gray plants, they may see green plants, where we see a red sun, they see a yellow sun like ours. Like they evolved with a color blindness, but on their planet, thats just the normal way of seeing. They needed to see green when looking at whatever photons reflected out of plants, because distinguishing between red fruit 🍎 and yellow 🍌 and green plants 🌱 was best scenario to maximize survival over those who evolved to see a different color. And of course they may see a color that we can’t even perceive, who knows.

Bonus: When investigating something like this video, you should not think of colors as how you perceive them, you should think about it as a particle of energy and that energy level inside your eyeball happens to generate an image perceived as some random color that better suited us for survival. We are just detecting energized photons flying through space, bouncing off of things and we’re doing it in a really whacky and crazy way through colors and shapes.

[coreydebruin]

Good to know, but Earthlings will never ever get to travel there, and make a living on those planets.

[BonnieVoltage]

How many earth-Like Planets we know, that Are orbiting itselfs