Air Date: December 28, 2009

Maria Pereira

Life in Technicolor

What will plants on other worlds look like? Will they be green and leafy as on Earth? Or could there be planets with purple trees? Black grassy plains? Orange marshes? These questions might seem purely speculative, something out of a technicolor daydream, but, in reality, their answers are bringing us closer to finding the first signs of extraterrestrial life. Unfortunately, they are not particularly easy questions to answer. In fact... Why are plants on Earth green?

Maria Pereira is a postdoctoral researcher at Steward Observatory in Tucson, Az. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2009, with a thesis on the dynamics of galaxies in clusters.