Radio Waves From Far-Off Planet Appear to Be a First

Astronomers say they've picked up a radio signal from a planet 63 light-years away—but, alas, it's not aliens calling. The bursts appear to be coming from Beta Pictoris b, a massive gas giant about 12 times Jupiter's mass, and point to the existence of an enormous magnetic field driving auroras similar to (but far more intense than) Earth's northern lights, reports CNN. "It is really exciting," Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at Berkeley who was not involved in the research, tells the New York Times. "Nobody has seen radio emission from a planet in this way."

Using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope array, Harvard researchers say they isolated the emission to the planet itself, not its host star—a first for an exoplanet. The findings were posted online and await peer review. They suggest Beta Pictoris b's magnetic field is at least 200 times stronger than Jupiter's, challenging assumptions that exoplanet fields would look roughly like ones in our own system. Scientists say such "auroral radio emissions" could become a powerful new way to probe exoplanet interiors and atmospheres, and they've requested more telescope time to figure out why this planet's magnetic field is so extreme.