MeerKAT records radio bursts that track Beta Pictoris b, not the star

Astronomers using the MeerKAT array in South Africa have reported the first radio emission they can tie to a planet outside the solar system rather than to its star. The planet is Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about 63 light-years away and about 12 times the mass of Jupiter. The paper, led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, was posted to arXiv on 15 September 2026 and is awaiting journal review. CNN reported the claim on 2 October.

The line the authors use is direct. "Here, we report the first direct detection of auroral radio emission from an exoplanet, the giant planet Beta Pictoris b, with the MeerKAT array." MeerKAT's 64 dishes recorded the emission across four sessions in 2025 and 2026. The signal was a set of rapid, repeating bursts of highly circularly polarised radio waves between 0.85 and 3.5 gigahertz, plus a steadier glow. The emission moved with the planet, not with Beta Pictoris itself.

Edo Berger, of Harvard and the Center for Astrophysics, is a co-author. He told CNN he knows radio signals are associated with searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, "but this is something very different." The process the team identifies is electron cyclotron maser radiation, the same class of emission that produces the auroral radio noise of Jupiter, Earth, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A magnetic field, not a transmitter, is the claim.

Beta Pictoris is a young star, about 1.75 times the mass of the Sun, with three known planets. Beta Pictoris b is the giant. It was already one of the few exoplanets with a direct image, which is why a radio detection from a body this well observed surprised the group. Berger's account of the find is ordinary lab talk: his student came in with the detection and said he would not be believed. That is a recollection, not a data point. The data point is the polarised bursts that track the planet's position.

Circular polarisation is the detail that makes the claim narrower than "we heard a planet." Electron cyclotron maser emission is strongly circularly polarised. Stellar flares can be polarised too, which is why the team had to show the source moved with the planet. A signal fixed on the star would have been a stellar result. A signal that follows the planet's orbit is the reason they call it planetary.

The frequency window, 0.85 to 3.5 gigahertz, sits inside MeerKAT's operating band. It is also the band where Jupiter's auroral radio emission has been studied for decades from Earth. The analogy is physical, not scenic. If the emission is cyclotron maser radiation, the frequency carries a clue to the magnetic field strength at the source, because the cyclotron frequency scales with the field. The paper's public summary, as reported, does not yet give a single field figure in gauss that a reader can quote without the preprint. The preprint is the place that number will have to be checked.

What the detection is not: a beacon, a technosignature, or evidence of life. Berger said so. The authors said so. The distance, 63 light-years, is close by exoplanet standards and irrelevant to any message. Nothing in the reported bursts is modulated as communication.

The result is still a preprint. Journal review can change the wording, the significance, or the attribution of the bursts. Until that review lands, the concrete public claim is the one in the arXiv line: auroral radio emission from Beta Pictoris b, seen by MeerKAT, polarised, and moving with the planet. Direct images of this system already existed. A radio detection tied to the planet, rather than the star, did not.