How to Hear a Planet Near a Dead Star express
The first exoplanet was discovered around an unusual cosmic lighthouse — a neutron star known as a pulsar. These ultra-dense remnants of dead stars spin at tremendous speeds and emit precise radio pulses. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell detected such signals, and at first they were mistaken for an alien message.
Now scientists have found a new way to "hear" planets around pulsars. Besides the pulses, the star emits a continuous wind — a stream of charged particles racing at nearly the speed of light. A planet in this hurricane becomes an obstacle: as the wind flows around it, it stirs up radio waves — like a stone thrown into a stream creates ripples in the water.
Computer simulations confirmed that such radio glow can be detected from the known pulsar PSR J0636+5129 b. This opens the door to finding other exoplanets in the harshest corners of the Universe, even where deadly radiation reigns.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2605.14077
Planets around pulsars were the first discovered exoplanets, found thanks to the extremely precise pulsar timing. Here we suggest that they could also be found through the radio emission generated by the pulsar-planet magnetospheric interaction. We present the results of special relativistic numerical simulations of planets in a pulsar wind of velocity $$v=0.985~c$$, corresponding to a Lorentz factor $$\gamma=5.795$$. Planets, modeled as a perfectly conducting solid surface in an external magnetic field originating from the pulsar, produce radio emission in the extended magnetic structure on the planet's nightside. We find that the planet around a known pulsar, PSR J0636+5129 b, could be detected via its radio emission. We outline the observational prospects for such objects.
Planets around pulsars are one of the most extreme places in the Universe: magnetic fields there are trillions of times stronger than Earth's, and the particle wind is accelerated to near light-speed.