First Radio Signal Directly From an Exoplanet: MeerKAT Catches Beta Pictoris b's Auroral Emission — and Its Magnetic Field
Late September 2026. Astronomers have "directly detected radio emission from a planet beyond our Solar System" for the first time — auroral bursts unambiguously traced to Beta Pictoris b, a 9–13 Jupiter-mass gas giant about 63 light-years away, using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope array (Sci.News). The team — Kevin Ortiz Ceballos (Harvard & Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues — posted the paper as arXiv preprint 2609.16720, "Discovery of radio emission from the exoplanet β Pictoris b."
What the signal is: the emission is attributed to the electron cyclotron maser instability — the same process behind auroral radio emission from Jupiter, Earth, and the other solar-system giants. "We attribute the radio emission to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling at Beta Pictoris b," the team writes. Because the emission's highest frequency scales with the magnetic field strength at the source, the detection yields a minimum field strength of about 1.25 kilogauss — several thousand times Earth's — which the authors call "the first direct measurement of magnetic field strength for an exoplanet, … consistent with dynamo-scaling predictions for a young, massive giant planet." The system is young (~23 million years old), and the planet spins fast (~8–9 hours per rotation per press coverage).
Why it matters: radio emission from exoplanets has been sought since the 1990s and repeatedly claimed-then-disputed via star-side signals. A planet-side detection opens a genuinely new channel: auroral radio power tracks magnetic field strength, rotation period, and star-planet interaction, and magnetospheres bear on habitability for Earth-like worlds. The New York Times covered the preprint on Sept 29 ("Beta Pictoris b appears to have an aurora caused by a powerful magnetic field. If confirmed, it would be the first such field known outside our solar system") — independent confirmation, e.g. with other instruments or at other frequencies, is the next step.