LOFAR Pioneers New Way to Study Exoplanet Environments
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Using the Dutch-led Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, astronomers have discovered unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. The radio waves bear the tell-tale signature of aurorae caused by an interaction between a star and its planet. The radio emission from a star-planet interaction has been predicted for over thirty-years but this is the first time astronomers have been able to discern its signature. This method, only possible with a sensitive radio telescope like LOFAR, opens the door to a new way of discovering exoplanets in the habitable zone and studying the environment they exist in.
[...] "The motion of the planet through a red dwarf's strong magnetic field acts like an electric engine much in the same way a bicycle dynamo works. This generates a huge current that powers aurorae and radio emission on the star." says Dr. Harish Vedantham, the lead author of the study and a Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) staff scientist.
[...] "We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star" said Dr. Joe Callingham, ASTRON postdoctoral fellow and co-author of the study. "A scaled up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in the form of a star-planet system, and the emission we observed fits the theory very well."
The group is now concentrating on finding similar emission from other stars. "We now know that nearly every red-dwarf hosts terrestrial planets, so there must be other stars showing similar emission. We want to know how this impacts our search for another Earth around another star" says Dr. Callingham.
Journal Reference: H. K. Vedantham et al. Coherent radio emission from a quiescent red dwarf indicative of star-planet interaction, Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1011-9
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.