For the first time, astronomers have directly detected radio emissions from a planet beyond our Solar System. This artist’s impression shows what the gas giant exoplanet might look like inside the disk of Beta Pictoris. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO. First discovered in 2008 by astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Beta Pictoris b is a gas giant 9 to 13 times the mass of Jupiter. The planet orbits its host star, Beta Pictoris, at a distance 8 times the Earth-Sun distance. The star also hosts at least two more planets and a circumstellar disk of gas and dust that, over time, could evolve into a torus of icy bodies much like the Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. The system is located about 63 light years away, in the constellation Pictor, and is estimated to be only 23 million years old. “The system’s most massive planet, Beta Pictoris b, reaches an angular separation of up to 0.55″ over its 24-year orbit, and the host star is magnetically quiet, making the system an ideal target for radio observations,” said Kevin Ortiz Ceballos of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues. Using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array, astronomers identified auroral radio bursts coming from beta Pictoris b. The discovery marks the first time that radio emission has been unequivocally traced to an exoplanet rather than its host star. Researchers attribute the signal to a mechanism called electron cyclotron maser instability, the same process responsible for auroral radio emission from Jupiter, Earth, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as some cool, planet-like brown dwarfs. “We attribute the radio emission to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling in Beta Pictoris b,” they said. Because the highest frequency of this type of emission depends directly on the strength of the magnetic field at its source, the detection allowed scientists to calculate a minimum magnetic field strength for beta Pictoris b of about 1.25 kilogauss, several thousand times stronger than Earth’s own magnetic field. “This constitutes the first direct measurement of magnetic field strength for an exoplanet, and is consistent with dynamo-scale predictions for a young, massive giant planet,” they said. The team’s paper was published this month on the arXiv.org preprint server. _____ Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos et al. 2026. Discovery of radio emission from exoplanet β Pictoris b. arXiv:2609.16720
