Description:

Title: Imaging All the Sky All the Time in Search of Radio Exoplanets

Speaker: Gregg Hallinan, Caltech 

Host: Deanne Coppejans

Abstract: All the magnetized planets in our solar system, including Earth, produce bright emission at low radio frequencies, predominantly originating in high magnetic latitudes and powered by auroral processes. It has long been speculated that similar radio emission may be detectable from exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, which would provide the first direct confirmation of the presence, strength and extent of exoplanetary magnetospheres, as well as informing on their role in shielding the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Despite 4 decades of observations, no detection has been achieved. Surprisingly, however, brown dwarfs have been found to produce both radio and optical emissions that are strikingly similar to the auroral emissions from solar system planets, albeit 10,000 times more luminous, bolstering the continued search for similar emission from exoplanets. I will discuss the auroral radio emission from exoplanets and brown dwarfs and introduce a new radio telescope, consisting of 352 antennas spaced across 2.5 km, that images the entire viewable sky every ten seconds at low radio frequencies, thereby monitoring thousands of stellar systems simultaneously in the search for radio emission from exoplanets. 

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics