Importance of biologically active aurora-like ultraviolet emission: Stochastic irradiation of Earth and Mars by flares and explosions

Habitable planets will be subject to intense sources of ionizing radiation and fast particles from a variety of sources-from the host star to distant explosions-on a variety of timescales. Monte Carlo calculations of high-energy irradiation suggest that the surfaces of terrestrial-like planets with thick atmospheres ( column densities greater than about 100 g cm(-2)) are well protected from directly incident X-rays and gamma-rays, but we find that sizeable fractions of incident ionizing radiation from astrophysical sources can be redistributed to biologically and chemically important ultraviolet wavelengths, a significant fraction of which can reach the surface. This redistribution is mediated by secondary electrons, resulting from Compton scattering and X-ray photoabsorption, the energies of which are low enough to excite and ionize atmospheric molecules and atoms, resulting in a rich aurora-like spectrum. We calculate the fraction of energy redistributed into biologically and chemically important wavelength regions for spectra characteristic of stellar flares and supernovae using a Monte-Carlo transport code and then estimate the fraction of this energy that is transmitted from the atmospheric altitudes of redistribution to the surface for a few illustrative cases. For atmospheric models corresponding to the Archean Earth, we assume no significant ultraviolet absorbers, only Rayleigh scattering, and find that the fraction of incident ionizing radiation that is received at the surface in the form of redistributed ultraviolet in the biologically relevant 200-320 nm region (UV-C and UV-B bands) can be up to 4%. On the present-day Earth with its ultraviolet ozone shield, this fraction is found to be 0.2%. Both values are many orders of magnitude higher than the fraction of direct ionizing radiation reaching the surface. This result implies that planetary organisms will be subject to mutationally significant, if intermittent, fluences of UV-B and harder radiation even in the presence of a narrow-band ultraviolet shield like ozone. We also calculate the surficial transmitted fraction of ionizing radiation and redistributed ultraviolet radiation for two illustrative evolving Mars atmospheres whose initial surface pressures were 1 bar. We discuss the frequency with which redistributed ultraviolet flux from parent star flares exceeds the parent star ultraviolet flux at the planetary surface. We find that the redistributed ultraviolet from parent star flares is probably a fairly rare intermittent event for habitable zone planets orbiting solar-type stars except when they are young, but should completely dominate the direct steady ultraviolet radiation from the parent star for planets orbiting all stars less massive than about 0.5 solar masses. Our results suggest that coding organisms on such planets ( and on the early Earth) may evolve very differently than on contemporary Earth, with diversity and evolutionary rate controlled by a stochastically varying mutation rate and frequent hypermutation episodes.