Limits on low frequency radio emission from southern exoplanets with the Murchison Widefield Array
astro-ph.EP
/ Authors
Tara Murphy, Martin E. Bell, David L. Kaplan, B. M. Gaensler, Andre R. Offringa, Emil Lenc, Natasha Hurley-Walker, G. Bernardi, J. D. Bowman, F. Briggs
and 32 more authors
R. J. Cappallo, B. E. Corey, A. A. Deshpande, D. Emrich, R. Goeke, L. J. Greenhill, B. J. Hazelton, J. N. Hewitt, M. Johnston-Hollitt, J. C. Kasper, E. Kratzenberg, C. J. Lonsdale, M. J. Lynch, S. R. McWhirter, D. A. Mitchell, M. F. Morales, E. Morgan, D. Oberoi, S. M. Ord, T. Prabu, A. E. E. Rogers, D. A. Roshi, N. Udaya Shankar
/ Abstract
We present the results of a survey for low frequency radio emission from 17 known exoplanetary systems with the Murchison Widefield Array. This sample includes 13 systems that have not previously been targeted with radio observations. We detected no radio emission at 154 MHz, and put 3 sigma upper limits in the range 15.2-112.5 mJy on this emission. We also searched for circularly polarised emission and made no detections, obtaining 3 sigma upper limits in the range 3.4-49.9 mJy. These are comparable with the best low frequency radio limits in the existing literature and translate to luminosity limits of between 1.2 x 10^14 W and 1.4 x 10^17 W if the emission is assumed to be 100% circularly polarised. These are the first results from a larger program to systematically search for exoplanetary emission with the MWA.