A Brief Review of Radio Emission from Ultracool Dwarfs
2018 October 16
Last year I was invited to write a chapter for the Springer’s sprawling Handbook of Exoplanets, a 3,400-page compendium summarizing the state of the field of exoplanet science. Unsurprisingly, the topic I was asked to write about was “Radio Emission from Ultracool Dwarfs.”
I decided to treat this invitation as an opportunity to write a brief review of the field, since there’s been a lot of progress in the past five years but, frankly, it’s not a field that’s big enough to draw the attention of a journal like the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Writing the chapter was a lot of fun! And, if I may say so myself, I hope that it gives a clear and concise introduction to the field and explanation of why it’s important. I tried to be careful to delineate between what the observations are, what our best-bet interpretations are, and the implications of those interpretations — paying special attention, of course, to the implications for exoplanets. I think there will be a lot of attention directed towards these objects in the coming years, since they are simultaneously easy-to-study analogues of massive exoplanets, while potentially important hosts of smaller exoplanets.
For better or for worse, there are two versions of the document that might be of interest:
- The official published version (DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-30648-3_171-1), published online earlier this year, which is behind a paywall.
- A version on arxiv.org (arXiv:1707.04264), uploaded in July 2017, which is somewhat expanded from the official version and is freely available.
I hope you’ll check them out!