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.
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.
Radio waves streaming from an alien planet may offer a new tool in the hunt for life elsewhere in the universe.
Astronomers have spotted these waves coming from what seems to be an aurora at the poles of Beta Pictoris b, a planet that circles a star more than 63 light-years from Earth. The aurora is probably caused by a powerful magnetic field, according to the research team.
If so, it would be the first confirmed magnetic field on a planet outside our solar system, and it could be a precursor to finding more worlds that might host life. The findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, were posted online on Sept. 15.
“It is really exciting,” said Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the paper. “Nobody has seen radio emission from a planet in this way.”
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Earth’s magnetic field protects the planet’s atmosphere — and the conditions for life on the surface — from being blown away by radiation flowing off the sun. That’s partly why astronomers have been keen to find such fields on alien worlds.
“Habitability is probably one of the main reasons we’re interested in magnetospheres,” said Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the University of Oregon who is an author of the paper.
Detecting magnetic fields on alien worlds is hard, but one trick is to look for radio emissions from the planets. A magnetic field will funnel electrons to a planet’s poles, producing auroras like the ones we see on the worlds of our solar system. When those electrons hit the poles, they can bounce back, releasing radio waves.
Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and his colleagues started by looking for radio emissions from a variety of stars using the MeerKAT radio telescope. MeerKAT is an array of 64 antennas spread across Meerkat National Park in South Africa and is one of the most advanced radio telescopes in the world.
In 2025 and early 2026, the team spotted something on Beta Pictoris b. The planet was discovered in 2008 through direct imaging: Astronomers saw the faint blip of light from the planet by blocking the light of its much brighter host star. It is nearly twice the size of Jupiter and is about 12 times as massive.
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Follow-up observations this May helped the team pinpoint radio emissions from Beta Pictoris b that seem to correspond to “very strong magnetic activity,” Mr. Ceballos said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/scie ... field.html source