Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – Tune in to the Exoplanetary Radio
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2401/tune-in-to-the-exoplanetary-radio/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Did you know that almost all stars have a companion planet, just like the Earth is a companion to the Sun? We call those planets found in other star systems exoplanets. It’s important to get to know the exoplanets and especially their atmospheres in a little more detail.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Tune in to the Exoplanetary Radio
Did you know that almost all stars have a companion planet, just like the Earth is a companion to the Sun?
Sounds a little like Dr. Who.
Anyway…
We call those planets found in other star systems exoplanets.
It’s important to get to know the exoplanets and especially their atmospheres in a little more detail.
OK, a lot more.
One way that we can study exoplanet atmospheres is to look for those exoplanets that pass in front of, or transit, their parent star.
The parent star’s light shines through the atmosphere of the planet, and the change in the spectrum of that light shows astronomers what some of the atmosphere’s gasses are.
This has worked for those lucky few exoplanets that are aligned so that they transit.
But what about the overwhelming bulk of the rest of the exoplanets?
The ones that aren’t transiting.
We need a new way to study exoplanet atmospheres that doesn’t require them to transit.
Astronomers think that studying the effects of spaceweather and radiation in space will shed more light on exoplanetary atmospheres.
You see, spaceweather is what we call the variations in the space environment.
Here in our solar system we experience spaceweather as solar wind, solar flares, solar storms, coronal mass ejections from the Sun and even cosmic rays from the rest of the Universe.
Did you see the aurora borealis this year?
That’s spaceweather!
Want to know more?
You can visit https://www.spaceweather.com and https://www.swpc.noaa.gov.
But how can we study the effects of spaceweather on a planet orbiting another star outside our Solar System?
How to even start?
Astronomers often start by studying similar objects and phenomena in our own planetary backyard to compare to those elsewhere in space.
Some of the main contributors to space weather in our Solar System are solar flares and coronal mass ejections or CMEs.
CMEs are powerful, huge, even titanic, explosions from the outer atmosphere of our Sun that release a hot soup of energetic plasma and magnetic fields into the Solar System.
A plasma is a gas that has had the outermost electrons in its atoms stripped away, making it electrically charged.
And since it’s charged, it’ll be affected by magnetic fields.
CMEs are often followed by a burst of peculiar faint radio waves.
Radio waves are just another version of light because they are on the same electromagnetic spectrum as light that we can see with our eyes.
Sometimes, if the energetic plasma reaches a planet with a strong magnetic field, like Jupiter in our Solar System, this can produce an aurora in visible light and detectable signals in the radio.
That’s right! Jupiter has auroras, too!
But wait, how can we really ‘see’ these peculiar, low frequency radio waves?
Well, with super-sensitive radio telescopes on Earth such as:
– The LOw-Frequency ARray or LOFAR,
– The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope or GMRT,
– The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array or VLA,
– The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope or FAST, and
– The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder or ASKAP.
By studying these peculiar radio signals from the CMEs and aurorae, astronomers think they can get a closer look at the hot plasma and the magnetic environment in our Solar System.
So, concomitantly, astronomers are actively looking for similar, weaker radio bursts from stars outside our Solar System to understand how their exoplanet’s atmospheres evolve.
They haven’t actually detected a CME at a star other than our Sun yet, though.
But they expect to soon be able to.
There are plans being worked on to upgrade these radio telescopes to make them more sensitive and able to detect spaceweather’s effects at exoplanets.
The first confirmed detection of aurorae at an exoplanet will open an entirely new field of astronomy, the field of comparative exo-magnetospheric physics!
How cool is that?
Hey, here’s another cool fact!
Observations in radio light provide detailed information about the planet, star, and space weather that are downright impossible to detect with other kinds of light.
In the coming years, radio astronomy will provide important clues to finding exoplanets that might support life as we know it.
If an exoplanet has an atmosphere, and its aurora indicates a magnetic field, then it just might be able to support life.
And you know the coolest thing about radio telescopes?
They work in the daytime!
Regular telescopes have to shut down when the Sun rises or when it’s cloudy!
Radio astronomers laugh at clouds!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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