Astronomers have traced a repeating radio signal back to a rocky, Earth-sized exoplanet that appears to have one of the crucial factors that make a world habitable: a magnetic field.
Before you get too excited, it's unlikely that YZ Ceti b is teeming with life as we know it, even if it does have a magnetic field. The rocky exoplanet is situated so close to YZ Ceti that its orbit is just two days .
For this reason, YZ Ceti b – with its very short orbit – is a prime candidate to pick up a magnetic field, interacting with its star more frequently and violently to generate radio waves strong enough to be detectable all the way from Earth. This is essentially what the team saw: across five observing periods, Villadsen and Pineda found powerful radio signals blasted out by YZ Ceti, almost in sync with the orbital period of YZ Ceti b, which indicates that it's the interaction between the planet and the star creating them.
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