Colloq Abstract - Anderson
September 6, 2019
11:00am Mountain
Marin Anderson (Caltech)
Extrasolar Space Weather Monitoring - Searching for Radio Emission from Nearby Stellar Systems
Abstract
The detection of planetary radio emission from objects beyond the solar system will provide the first direct measurements of exoplanetary magnetic field strengths, as well as provide insight on the degree to which those magnetospheres can shield exoplanet atmospheres against the surrounding space weather environment of their host stars. Similarly, the detection of radio emission indicative of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from nearby stars will probe the space weather environments of those stars, and provide the first direct measure of how transient mass loss scales with spectral type, age, rotation, and level of magnetic activity.
I will summarize the current state of the field, and discuss why searches for planetary radio emission and stellar CMEs are critical for diagnosing exoplanet habitability, but have remained unsuccessful thus far. The Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA) may be poised to change this. The OVRO-LWA is a 352-element dipole array operating below 100 MHz that images the entire viewable sky at 10 second cadence across 70 MHz of bandwidth. I will discuss the current status of extrasolar space weather science with the OVRO-LWA, as well as the future capabilities of the upgraded OVRO-LWA.
