Astronomers have detected radio signals coming directly from a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The signal is not from aliens.

The repeating radio bursts come from Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about 63 light-years from Earth and roughly 12 times Jupiter’s mass. A team led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos of the Center for Astrophysics (Harvard and Smithsonian) captured them with South Africa’s MeerKAT array.

The bursts are auroras, like Earth’s northern lights but far stronger. ‘I know radio signals are associated with searches for extraterrestrial intelligence,’ said co-author Edo Berger of Harvard. ‘But this is something very different.’

The team estimated the planet’s magnetic field at a minimum of 1,250 gauss, the first direct magnetic-field measurement for an exoplanet. Jupiter’s field is about 4.3 gauss; Earth’s is about 0.5.

The paper was posted to arXiv on September 15 and awaits peer review. Listening to distant worlds could open a new way to study exoplanets.