Sign up to see the future today. Unmissable innovations from the cutting edge of science and technology. So far, astronomers have confirmed more than 6,300 exoplanets orbiting a host star beyond our solar system. They range from small rocky worlds to huge gas orbs like our own Jupiter or Saturn. Some, scientists suspect, could harbor life because they orbit their star in the habitable zone, the region where conditions are ideal for liquid water to exist on its surface. Getting a close look at these worlds remains a challenge because of the unfathomable distances they involve. Distinguishing the signals emanating from these exoplanets from their much brighter host stars has also been an insurmountable challenge, until now. As detailed in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed paper, a team of astrophysicists from Harvard and the University of Oregon, Eugene, say they have detected radio signals directly from an exoplanet for the first time using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The planet, called beta Pictoris b, is a gas giant with a mass of more than 11 Jupiters that takes more than 23 Earth years to orbit its host star. It was first discovered in 2008 and is located 64 light years from Earth. And no, this is not a sign that an extraterrestrial civilization that somehow lives on the gas giant is trying to contact us. The radio emissions appear to be the result of natural auroras, charged particles moving along the planet’s magnetic field, not unlike those we experience here on Earth. “We detected fast, recurrent and highly circularly polarized bursts, as well as persistent emissions, at frequencies from 0.85 to 3.5 GHz,” the researchers note in their paper. The team managed to isolate the signal from the exoplanet’s host star, Beta Pictoris, using the known location of the quasars to determine the exact location of the source. Quasars are extremely magnetized and bright celestial objects at the centers of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. Astronomers use them as “beacons” to triangulate the locations of other distant objects. Direct detection of radio emissions even allowed the team to determine that the exoplanet’s magnetic field is more than 300 times stronger than Jupiter’s. “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,” the researchers noted in their paper. While we can now analyze their radio wave emissions, visiting these distant worlds remains a distant dream. Even the furthest man-made spacecraft, Voyager 1, is slowly approaching to within a single light-day of Earth, while the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, believed to host a “super-Earth” exoplanet, is more than four light-years away. More on exoplanets: Astronomers excited after discovering best place yet to look for extraterrestrial life
