التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
| العنوان: |
Predicting biosignatures for nutrient-limited biospheres. |
| المؤلفون: |
Nicholson, A E, Daines, S J, Mayne, N J, Eager-Nash, J K, Lenton, T M, Kohary, K |
| المصدر: |
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; 11/30/2022, Vol. 517 Issue 1, p222-239, 18p |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: |
BIOSPHERE, EXTRATERRESTRIAL life, IMPACT strength, ENERGY harvesting, POPULATION dynamics, MAINTENANCE costs, PLANETARY atmospheres, EXTRATERRESTRIAL beings |
| مستخلص: |
With the characterizations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might indicate alien life, we must understand the abiotic characteristics of a planet and how life interacts with its environment. In the field of biogeochemistry, sophisticated models of life-environment coupled systems demonstrate that many assumptions specific to Earth-based life, e.g. specific ATP maintenance costs, are unnecessary to accurately model a biosphere. We explore a simple model of a single-species microbial biosphere that produces CH 4 as a byproduct of the microbes' energy extraction – known as a type I biosignature. We demonstrate that although significantly changing the biological parameters has a large impact on the biosphere's total population, such changes have only a minimal impact on the strength of the resulting biosignature, while the biosphere is limited by H 2 availability. We extend the model to include more accurate microbial energy harvesting and show that adjusting microbe parameters can lead to a regime change where the biosphere becomes limited by energy availability and no longer fully exploits the available H 2, impacting the strength of the resulting biosignature. We demonstrate that, for a nutrient-limited biosphere, identifying the limiting nutrient, understanding the abiotic processes that control its abundance, and determining the biospheres ability to exploit it, are more fundamental for making type I biosignature predictions than the details of the population dynamics of the biosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| قاعدة البيانات: |
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