LOFAR and New Way to Find Exoplanets
Exoplanets have been coming in thick and fast over the last few decades, with currently around 4,500 confirmed planets, with another 5000 odd candidates waiting for additional sightings to confirm.
Despite the numbers, planet finding is still lacking in certain areas, it's great at finding very large planets very close in to the star, or planets that pass between us and the star, causing the light to dip which again favours the larger and closer in planets.
Large planets far enough to be visible are also a possibility, but finding small rocky planets in the habitable zone still remains a difficult task.
This is where LOFAR comes in, a vast array of radio telescopes stretched across Europe, and particularly well suited to low radio frequencies, the very radio frequencies our own planet gives off in Aurora, the interaction between our planet and the stellar outbursts which flood our area of space from time to time.
So, LOFAR has begun checking out potential stars, and teamed up with TESS to keep an eye on the star itself to make sure anything detected wasn't just the star behaving badly. Between the two of them, they have found their first candidate in Ursa Major, a red dwarf around 26 light years from Earth called GJ1151
The planet found is thought to be around 1.2 times the size of Earth, and orbits the star every 2 days.
