Detecting Exoplanets Through Their Exoauroras

At present, scientists can only look for planets beyond our Solar System using indirect means.
Depending on the method, this will involve looking for signs of transits in front of a star (Transit
Photometry), measuring a star for signs of wobble (Doppler Spectroscopy), looking for light reflected
from a planet’s atmosphere (Direct Imaging), and a slew of other methods.

Based on certain parameters, astronomers are then able to determine whether a planet is potentially-
habitable or not. However, a team of astronomers from the Netherlands recently released a study in
which they describe a novel approach for exoplanet-hunting: looking for signs of aurorae. As these are
the result of interaction between a planet’s magnetic field and a star, this method could be a shortcut to
finding life!
To break it down, interactions between a magnetic field and the charged particles that are regularly
emitted by a star (aka. solar wind) are what cause aurorae. Moreover, the presence of this phenomenon
produces radio waves that have a distinct signature that can be detected by radio observatories here on
Earth. This is precisely what the Netherlands-based astronomers did using the Low Frequency
Array (LOFAR).

LOFAR is a multipurpose sensor array that is paired with a computer and network infrastructure to can
handle extremely large volumes of data. The core of the array (the “superterp“) consists of a network of
thirty-eight stations concentrated in the northeast of the Netherlands with 14 additional stations in
neighboring Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, Poland, and Latvia.
As they indicate in their study, which recently appeared in the journal Nature, LOFAR was able to
detect the type of low-frequency radio waves that were predicted from a nearby star – GJ 1151, an M-
type red dwarf over 25 light-years from Earth. As Harish Vedantham, a staff scientist at ASTRON and
the lead author of study, explained in an NYU press statement:

“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.”

These kinds of star-planet interactions have been predicted for over thirty years, in part based on the
aurora activity that has been observed in the Solar System. While the Sun’s magnetic field is not strong
enough to produce these types of radio emissions elsewhere in the Solar System, similar activity has
been seen with Jupiter and its largest Moons.

For example, interactions between Jupiter’s strong magnetic field and Io (the innermost of its largest
moons) produces auroras and bright radio emissions that even outshine the Sun at sufficiently low
frequencies. However, this was the first time astronomers have detected and deciphered these kinds of
radio signals from another star system.
As Joe Callingham, an ASTRON postdoctoral fellow and a co-author of the study, indicated:
“We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star. A
scaled-up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in star-planet systems, and the emission
we observed fits the theory very well.”
Their findings were confirmed by a second team whose research is detailed in a study that appeared in
The Astrophysical Journal Letters. For their study, Pope and his colleagues relied on data provided by
the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher North (HARPS-N) instrument on the Galileo
National Telescope (TNG), located on the island of La Palma, Spain.