An artist’s impression of the hot-Jupiter exoplanet tau Boötis b. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO.
Tau Boötis is a binary stellar system approximately 51 light-years away in the constellation of Boötes.
It consists of a hot and young F-type star, tau Boötis A, and a smaller M3-type (red dwarf) star, tau Boötis B.
In 1996, a hot-Jupiter exoplanet was discovered orbiting the primary star tau Boötis A.
Named tau Boötis b, the alien world has a mass almost 6 times that of Jupiter and an orbital period of 3 days and 7.5 hours.
“We present one of the first hints of detecting an exoplanet in the radio realm,” said Dr. Jake Turner, an astronomer in the Department of Astronomy and Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia.