Astronomers have made the first direct detection of auroral radio emission localized to an exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b. A team led by Harvard and Smithsonian astrophysicist Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, working with the University of Oregon, reported the find in a paper posted on September 15 that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The team used South Africa's MeerKAT array of 64 radio dishes to observe the Beta Pictoris system four times between February 2025 and May 2026. They caught signals between about 0.85 and 3.5 GHz and determined the bursts came from the planet, not its host star. The host star is magnetically quiet, which made the system an ideal target.

The emission is natural, attributed to massive auroras. The bursts are fast, repeating and strongly polarized, matching how auroras produce radio waves, the same mechanism seen at Jupiter, the strongest radio emitter in our solar system. The researchers explicitly make no claim about extraterrestrial intelligence.

Beta Pictoris b is a young gas giant about 63-64 light-years away, roughly 12 times Jupiter's mass. The team measured its magnetic field at 1,250 gauss, about 291 times stronger than Jupiter's 4.3 gauss, the first magnetic-field measurement of an exoplanet.