Years Away Appears To Have Northern Lights. A Telescope In South Africa Picked Up Their Radio Signal

The signal is not a message. It is the same kind of crackle Jupiter’s auroras send out, and it gives the first direct reading of a distant planet’s magnetic field.

Beta Pictoris is a young star about 63 light-years away. It has at least three known planets. The one called Beta Pictoris b is a gas giant roughly ten times the mass of Jupiter, and one of the most studied exoplanets in the sky.

Between 2025 and 2026, a team pointed MeerKAT, South Africa’s radio telescope array, at the system four separate times. Each time, they recorded radio emission : short, rapid, recurring bursts, plus a steady background glow, at frequencies between about 0.85 and 3.5 gigahertz.

Radio waves have been detected from planet-hosting systems before. The difficulty has always been proving they came from the planet and not from the star it orbits, which is vastly brighter.