&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Scientists detect first radio signals directly from faraway planet")
A team of scientists has detected radio signals coming directly from a planet outside our solar system. Radio detections in the past could not be certainly attributed to coming from the exoplanet or its star. But this one is reaching us from the exoplanet. However, before you get excited thinking we may have finally found alien life, you should know that this signal is actually coming from the auroras on the planet. Scientists were observing a star 63.4 light-years away when they stumbled upon this signal.
The authors wrote in the paper that previously, auroral radio bursts have been seen in Solar System planets and in some ultracool dwarfs. But "no radio detection has previously been unambiguously localised to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star."
When charged particles interact with the atmosphere and magnetic fields, energy is released, which is what is reaching Earth. "We detect rapid, recurring, and highly circularly polarised bursts, as well as persistent emission, at frequencies of 0.85 to 3.5 GHz," they wrote. The frequencies, or the radio signals, were picked up by the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa, four different times in 2025 and 2026.
Could the radio signal be coming from Beta Pictoris?
Beta Pictoris has three known planets - Beta Pictoris b, Beta Pictoris c, and Beta Pictoris d. Researchers detected short, repeating radio bursts with strongly circularly polarised radio waves, something that clearly signals that it is from an aurora. Beta Pictoris is an "early-type" star that has never been known to emanate radio signals. The structure of such stars is different from our Sun, and they are also hotter and bigger.
Using quasars as reference points, they determined that the signal was coming from the planet Beta Pictoris b.
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"This constitutes the first direct measurement of magnetic field strength for an exoplanet, and is consistent with dynamo-scaling predictions for a young, massive giant planet," the researchers wrote in the paper which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Beta Pictoris B
Isolating the radio signal also revealed that Electron Cyclotron Maser Instability (ECMI), the same process that produces auroras on Earth and Jupiter, was responsible for what was happening on planet b. This shows that Beta Pictoris B has a strong magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth's. It completes one spin in just 8-9 hours, and this speedy rotation possibly powers the auroral radio emission. The planet is 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
