World’s Largest Telescope to Search for Planets With Magnetic Fields

The search is on.

The largest radio telescope in the world, the Chinese FAST radio telescope, will search for planets with magnetic fields similar to that of Earth, at distances of up to 100 light-years from the Solar System.

An international group of astronomers has published an ambitious observation plan using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in the academic journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Li Di, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist at FAST, stresses that habitable planets must not only have water, a suitable temperature, and atmosphere, but also a magnetic field that maintains the atmosphere around the planet and protects possible lifeforms on the planet from cosmic rays.

Artists rendering of how Earth's magnetic field works. Shutterstock.


Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets, but they have not been discovered yet.

As of today, around 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the universe.

In our solar system, there are six magnetized planets with a planetary-scale magnetic field: Mercury, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

“In our solar system, magnetized planets are strong radio sources. Radio detection of exoplanets aims at the physical characterization of exoplanets and comparative studies with solar system planets,” explained Philippe Zarka, an astronomer from the Paris Observatory.

“We want to try FAST, which is the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, if we can first detect the radiation from an exoplanet and confirm its magnetic field, it would be a very important discovery,” Li revealed.

Astronomers have searched for radio signals from exoplanets, but have so far not found anything.

But things are about to change.



To date, most of the planets we know of in the universe have been discovered by the ‘legendary’ Kepler Space Telescope, which has found exoplanets at distances of more than 500 light-years away from Earth.


But astronomers around the world are putting a great deal in an effort to search for new alien worlds.

In 2018, NASA launched its newest planet-hunting telescope the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which searches the cosmos for exoplanets closer to Earth.




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