Scientists are seeking clues to what is life in the extrasolar planets, they are studying various biosignatures found in the light spectrum leaking out to earth to speculate on something more basic and essential than the musical expertise of Droopy McCool.What they are concerned with is to what kind of photosynthesis might occur on such planets and what extrasolar plants might look alike.

There are 9 planets within our solar system and all of them are rotating around the sun. That’s a unique setup and until the mid 90s the idea of other solar systems in distant galaxies was mere speculation. That speculation became a reality in 1995 when the first extra-solar planet called 51 Pegasi b was discovered. What exactly is an extra-solar planet then ? Well simply put it’s a planet that not only exists outside of our solar system but also has its own central star which it rotates around. These planets are known as exoplanets or extra-solar planets. Since 1995 more than 200 extra-solar planets have been found and all of these are as big if not bigger than Jupiter. As technology improves perhaps smaller exo-planets can also be found but for now the mere existence of these exoplanets is an amazing discovery and really brings the subject of extra terrestrial life to the forefront of scientific discussion.

It could be that the plants are black there. Plants on Earth are green because of chlorophyll, which harnesses the energy of the sun to make sugars for metabolism. But our plants aren’t completely efficient — they waste a little bit of light. “Ideally, what you want is a black molecule that absorbs all of the light,” Blankenship said. “There could be another system developed on an extrasolar planet where plants are completely black if the spectrum of light that’s available to organisms is different from the light available to organisms on Earth.

They also are looking into the “red edge” effect. Seen at 700 nanometers out, beyond the limit of normal human vision, this reflectance spectrum is a signature of the fact that there is very intense chlorophyll absorption going on.

NASA has two missions in the works designed to find possible evidence for life on extrasolar planets. One features a space-based instrument that will make measurements in the near infrared region; the other measures longer wavelengths to get good biosignatures for things like methane and oxygen. Blankenship said that speculation about the natural world of extrasolar planets is at this point speculative, but that it is important to get a handle on what the possibilities are, how things might look, what measurements to make and what experiments to do to conclude whether there is life on another world.