(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have been investigating supposed living creatures from ancient Earth to figure out what simple alien life might look like.
In geology, as experts are sure, you can find information about what aliens look like.
Early life on Earth lived in conditions of low oxygen levels, plus, it had almost no energy sources that modern life forms are used to.
The only source of energy for the vital activity of early primitive life was the light of the Sun.
Before living organisms acquired photosynthesis, they used sunlight in many ways.
For example, rhodopsin proteins helped them capture solar energy, but the efficiency of this method is much lower than that of photosynthesis.
The authors of the new study tracked the evolutionary paths of rhodopsins, thanks to which they created a genealogical tree of these proteins important for ancient life.
Ancient rhodopsins, as the study showed, were focused on the absorption of light in the blue and green parts of the spectrum, and not in the orange and yellow, as modern ones.
This and other features can tell astronomers which biomarkers to look for when looking for life in the universe.
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