European grant allows ASTRON astronomer Joe Callingham to study the space weather of other worlds

“A fundamental goal of astronomy in the coming decades is to determine whether a planet around another star could be habitable,” Callingham says. An important piece in this habitability puzzle is the environmental conditions of an exoplanet: the ‘space weather’ it experiences. Callingham: “However, determining the space weather conditions around a star has previously been challenging because of the limited sensitivity of radio telescopes.”

The award of this ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant is a testimony to Callingham’s track record in radio astronomy. Callingham has been involved in the development of a technique to use the LOFAR radio telescope to study exoplanet environments and recently detected nineteen stellar systems using this technique. He also has detected some of the brightest radio bursts ever detected from a star, and found new stars that defy our understanding of how massive stars die.

He has also already received several awards, such as the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Louise Webster Prize for outstanding post-doctoral research, which he received for his search for the most extreme objects in the Universe.

To this record track, Callingham can now add the ERC Starting Grant, a grant administrated by the European Research Council, which is only awarded to promising scientifically talented early-career scientists.

Callingham’s research proposal, titled Radio stars and exoplanets: Discovering the space weather of worlds, focuses on observing stars and exoplanets at radio frequencies. Using this funding Callingham will try to scale up radio calibration and polarimetric techniques that he has developed to study some of the most promising exoplanet planet hosting stars. Callingham: “The grant will facilitate a leap in our understanding of the environments around stars and the underlying laws governing the generation of planetary magnetic fields — information that will guide us in the coming revolution in exoplanet habitability.”

“I am very excited and privileged to hire new PhD students and postdoctoral scholars to join my team and further humanity’s understanding of planets around other stars.” Callingham says. “This field is undergoing a revolution thanks to the current generation of telescopes, such as LOFAR, and it will be thrilling to contribute to that revolution over the next 5 years as the billion euro Square Kilometer Array (SKA) comes online.” In total, the ERC has awarded 494 Starting Grants this year, with a funding totaling nearly 780 million euros.

¹ Radio telescopes observe the universe at a difference frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum than optical telescopes do. Optical telescopes observe what we call the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum; the light that we can see with the naked eye. However, visible light forms only a tiny piece of the electromagnetic spectrum, which encompasses all of the light that there is. Other examples of light are infrared and X-ray. Both are forms of light we cannot see with the naked eye, but with the proper instrument (night goggles, medical X-ray photographs) we can detect these particular light waves. Radio waves are light waves with the longest wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that they can also travel the furthest throughout the Universe.