For the first time in history, astronomers have directly detected radio signals coming from a planet outside our solar system. An international team led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian used South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array to capture faint, repeating bursts of radio waves from the β Pictoris system, located approximately 64 light-years from Earth.
The gas giant β Pictoris b turned out to be the source. To confirm this, researchers compared their radio images against the precise positions of distant background quasars acting as fixed reference markers. When overlaid on the map, the signal aligned exactly with the planet’s position rather than its parent star. The radio waves are produced by auroras linked to the planet’s powerful magnetic field — the same mechanism that creates the northern lights on Earth, but on a vastly larger scale.
The discovery also yielded the first direct measurement of an exoplanet’s magnetic field: at least 1,250 gauss at the emission source, far stronger than Jupiter’s field. This matches theoretical predictions for young, massive gas giants and opens an entirely new observational window for studying planetary interiors, testing formation models, and eventually surveying exoplanetary magnetic fields across the galaxy.
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