Building a Radio Camera in Search of Exoplanet Magnetospheres

Citation

Huang, Yuping (2025) Building a Radio Camera in Search of Exoplanet Magnetospheres. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/5wym-kg12. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:06072025-035609195

Abstract

Detections of exoplanetary magnetic field will add an important axis for understanding their properties. It is also important to place planets in the context of their stars, many of which exhibit different activity paradigms from that of the Sun. In this thesis, I attempt to characterize the energetic particle environment around young M dwarf using existing millimeter observations, and attempt to detect an exoplanetary magnetic field.

The detection of exoplanetary magnetic field requires both exquisite sensitivity and long-term monitoring at low (<100MHz) radio frequencies. I dedicated a significant efforts to the expansion of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA), especially the complete redesign of the compute cluster. I set up the compute infrastructure and wrote the processing pipeline that made a search through 3 petabytes of data for the radio emission from Tau Bootis b, covering multiple orbits of the planet, possible.

The OVRO-LWA will ultimately transition to a radio camera paradigm, where the telescope operates continuously and produces images as its data product. The 2000-element Deep Synoptic Array (DSA-2000) will be the first true radio camera optimized for surveys. I validated key design requirements of the DSA-2000 through forward modeling, and prototyped the radio camera on the OVRO-LWA.

Thesis Files