Approximately 63 light-years from Earth , researchers have detected a strange signal for the first time after tracing repeated radio emissions to Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant several times bigger than Jupiter .
The research has been published online on arXiv, although it has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. MeerKAT’s precision allowed the team to distinguish short, repeated bursts from the planet’s location rather than from its parent star. The discovery of radio signals from a distant planet may sound like evidence of alien life, but scientists say that is not the case here. The finding gives astronomers a new way to study planets beyond our solar system.
Beta Pictoris b is an exoplanet discovered in 2008, located around 63 light-years from Earth. NASA has estimated that the planet has a mass 11.729 times that of Jupiter. It takes Beta Pictoris b 23.6 years to orbit its star, and it is located 10.018 AU from the star.
“This 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,” the researchers wrote in their study.
Researchers from the Harvard & Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and the University of Oregon say Beta Pictoris b is the source of radio emissions, something that has never previously been detected from another planet .
