Astronomers have traced repeating radio emissions directly to an exoplanet outside the solar system for the first time, identifying the source as Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant located about 63 light-years from Earth. Researchers from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Oregon used South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array to distinguish the signals from the planet’s parent star, Beta Pictoris.
The finding provides a new way to study the magnetic environment of distant planets. The research has been made available on arXiv but has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
