{"id":864397,"date":"2026-09-29T06:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T06:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864397\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T06:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T06:18:11","slug":"astronomers-detect-radio-signal-from-beta-pictoris-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/864397\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Detect Radio Signal from Beta Pictoris b"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time, astronomers have directly detected radio emission from a planet beyond our Solar System.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-53729\" class=\"size-full wp-image-53729\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image_6336-Beta-Pictoris-b.jpg\" alt=\"This artist\u2019s impression shows how the gas giant exoplanet inside the disc of Beta Pictoris may look. Image credit: L. Cal\u00e7ada \/ ESO.\" width=\"580\" height=\"348\"  \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-53729\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This artist\u2019s impression shows how the gas giant exoplanet inside the disc of Beta Pictoris may look. Image credit: L. Cal\u00e7ada \/ ESO.<\/p>\n<p>First discovered in 2008 by astronomers using ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sci.news\/astronomy\/beta-pictoris-b-mass-06336.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Beta Pictoris b<\/a> is a gas giant 9 to 13 times the mass of Jupiter.<\/p>\n<p>The planet orbits its host star, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sci.news\/astronomy\/five-new-beta-pictoris-exocomets-10723.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Beta Pictoris<\/a>, at a distance of 8 times the Earth-Sun distance.<\/p>\n<p>The star also hosts at least two more planets and a circumstellar disk of gas and dust that could, in time, evolve into a torus of icy bodies much like Solar System\u2019s Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n<p>The system is located around 63 light-years away in the constellation of Pictor, and is estimated to be only 23 million years old.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe most massive planet in the system, Beta Pictoris b, reaches an angular separation of up to 0.55\u2019\u2019 across its 24-year orbit, and the host star is magnetically quiet, making the system an ideal target for radio observations,\u201d said Kevin Ortiz Ceballos from the Harvard &amp; Smithsonian\u2019s Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues.<\/p>\n<p>Using South Africa\u2019s MeerKAT radio telescope array, the astronomers identified auroral radio bursts coming from beta Pictoris b.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery marks the first time radio emission has been unambiguously traced to an exoplanet itself rather than its host star.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers attribute the signal to a mechanism called the electron cyclotron maser instability, the same process responsible for auroral radio emission from Jupiter, Earth, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as some cold, planet-like brown dwarfs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe attribute the radio emission to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling at Beta Pictoris b,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n<p>Because the highest frequency of this type of emission depends directly on the strength of the magnetic field at its source, the detection allowed the scientists to calculate a minimum magnetic field strength for beta Pictoris b of about 1.25 kilogauss \u2014 several thousand times stronger than Earth\u2019s own magnetic field.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis constitutes the first direct measurement of magnetic field strength for an exoplanet, and is consistent with dynamo-scaling predictions for a young, massive giant planet,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n<p>The team\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2609.16720v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">paper<\/a> was posted this month on the arXiv.org preprint server.<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos et al. 2026. Discovery of radio emission from the exoplanet \u03b2 Pictoris b. arXiv: 2609.16720<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time, astronomers have directly detected radio emission from a planet beyond our Solar System. This&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":864398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[29407,364637,364638,22246,123648,29411,20500,96193,364639,30980,79,1695],"class_list":["post-864397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-atmosphere","tag-beta-pictoris","tag-beta-pictoris-b","tag-exoplanet","tag-gas-giant","tag-ionosphere","tag-magnetic-field","tag-magnetosphere","tag-meerkat-telescope","tag-radio-signal","tag-science","tag-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/864398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}