| Posted: 2018-June-10 at 1:33pm | IP Logged
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I like it.
Maybe the plants glow red to get rid of excess energy. That's the reason most Earth plants are green. They can use blue light for photosynthesis, one photon per reaction. Red light also works, using two photons for one reaction. The green wavelengths don't fit either, and absorbing them cause the plant to overheat, so they're reflected.
On Proxima b, red would be the high-energy photons. If a plant absorbed too much energy in the usual infrared wavelengths, being able to reradiate it as visible high-energy photons would be handy. Why they don't just reflect the excess I don't know, but there are plenty of bioluminescent lifeforms on Earth, so why on Prox-b?
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