"Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets for some time," Suzanne Aigrain, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "There have been tentative, indirect detections before, but this is the first truly convincing direct detection, and it hopefully paves the way for many more."
"There are two natural processes that can produce radio emission in exoplanets," Aigrain said. "One is magnetic reconnection, when the planet orbits really close to the star and its magnetic field interacts directly with that of the star. The other is aurorae (like those we have on Earth and on other solar system planets like Saturn, but much stronger), when energetic charged particles streaming from the star interact with the upper atmosphere of the planet."
In the study, a research group led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, turned MeerKAT, a radio telescope array in South Africa, toward a massive gas giant called Beta Pictoris b, an exoplanet that's 64 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly 10 times that of Jupiter, according to NASA. They picked up rapid, repeating bursts of radio signals coming from the planet.
"No radio detection has previously been unambiguously localized to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star," they wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet.
Magnetic-field measurements like these are important because we don't fully understand how planets' magnetospheres are generated and what controls how strong they are, Aigrain said. The ability to measure a planet's magnetic field could also help in our search for potentially habitable exoplanets.
RELATED STORIES"[A] planet's magnetic field shields its atmosphere from the 'wind' of charged particles from [its] star, which might otherwise carry material away from the atmosphere," Aigrain said. "On Earth, for example, the magnetic field has played a key role in retaining the atmosphere and shielding life on the planet from harmful high-energy radiation.
MeerKAT is a pathfinder instrument for a new large telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, which is expected to come online in the next few years. This observatory "will be significantly more powerful," Aigrain said, "so there will be many more systems where we can look for this type of signal."
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