This artist’s concept shows a gas giant planet orbiting the cool red dwarf star Gliese 876 (Image: G Bacon (STScI) / NASA)
ALIEN worlds that are friendly to life could reveal themselves by radio signals crackling from their magnetic fields.
When struck by high energy particles in the solar wind, an exoplanet’s magnetic field may produce radio signals from auroras in the planet’s atmosphere. While current telescopes have yet to pick up these crackles, it’s an area worth exploring, argue Joseph Lazio at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and colleagues in a paper submitted to Astro2010.
Because…
