Who is knocking at the door? Apparently another planet. It was discovered by an international team of scientists from Cornell University. There are radio bursts from the constellation Boötes, 51 light years from Earth. It doesn’t appear to come from any of the stars in the constellation, but from an exoplanet. It would be the first radio emission recorded directly from a planet outside our solar system.
Signals from the exoplanet
Jake D. Turner from Cornell University, Philippe Zarka from the Paris Observatory and Jean-Mathias Griessmeier from the University of Orleans published their results. This is announced in the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics magazine.
“We present one of the first indications of the detection of radio emissions from an exoplanet,” explains Turner. The signal comes from the Tau Boötes system. it contains a double star orbited by a planet. ‘
The researchers say that if this discovery is corroborated by other observations, “it will open a new window to study exoplanets and give us a new opportunity to study alien worlds ten light-years away.”
It would be a hot Jupiter-type exoplanet, a gas giant orbiting a very short distance from its sun. Observing an exoplanet’s magnetic field can help astronomers. They would decipher the physics of the interactions between the planet itself and its host star. For example, Turner said, “The magnetic field of Earth-like exoplanets can add to their potential habitability.”
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Two years ago, Turner and his colleagues examined Jupiter’s radio signature. They scaled these emissions to mimic the possible signatures of distant Jupiter-like exoplanets. That was the “template” the researchers used. They looked for radio emissions from exoplanets at distances between 40 and 100 light years.
Over a hundred hours later, they managed to find the signature of the radio broadcast on Tau Boötes. “We learned what this type of emission is from our own Jupiter,” notes Turner. Then we looked for her and found her.
Even so, the radio signal that appears to be coming from a planet is still weak. So for Turner there is still a certain amount of uncertainty that the detected radio signal actually originated from the planet. The need for further follow-up observations is critical. ‘
His team will use several radio telescopes to track the Tau Boötes signal. Hello, with space?
