While tracing a radio signal captured by the LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands in 2019, American and European astronomers have discovered a mysterious super-Earth.
Unfortunately, the recorded radio signals may not originate from an extraterrestrial civilization, but from a phenomenon known as “alfvenic side effects,” according to a publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The mysterious planet is a super Earth named Gliese 1151b, with a mass 2.5 times that of our planet. It revolves around an M4.5 dwarf, 26 light years away, in the constellation of the Big Star. Gliese 1151b becomes extremely close to the mother, only 2.02 days to complete.
The team led by Professor Duvrath Mahadevan of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University said planets with orbits this close would be “submerged” in a magnetized stellar wind.
The planet itself also disrupts the flow of magnetized stellar winds, creating a great source of energy that acts against the mother star.
This energetic interaction causes radio broadcasts to become so incredibly powerful that a planet as far away as Earth can catch it.
According to Sci-News, this interesting discovery is due to LOFAR, a low-frequency matrix radio periscope located in the Netherlands. Scientists have used more observatories in the United States and Europe to confirm this mysterious super-Earth: the Viable Planet Finder (HPF) mounted on the Hobby-Eberly 10m telescope at the McDonald Observatory, the HARP-N spectrophotometer at the Gallileo observatory and NASA’s TESS Exoplanet Survey satellite.
