How planet Beta Pictoris B creates mysterious radio signals

Now what if a planet 63 light years away started sending out a repeated radio signal? Astronomers have now traced such signals to Beta Pictoris b, a massive young exoplanet many times the size of Jupiter. Discovered in 2008 but before you think aliens, scientists say that the signal is not the evidence of life. And instead they believe it is coming from powerful auroras around the planet. The signals were detected using South Africa's Meerkat radio telescope array, astronomers had already detected radioactivity from the Beta Pictoris star system, but they could not tell whether the emissions were coming from the star or from one of its planets. The telescope picked up short repeated radio bursts coming from the direction of Beta Pictoris b, allowing researchers to link the emissions to the planet itself. So what is powering these cosmic signals? Well, Beta Pictoris b is a primordial gas giant with a powerful magnetic field. Charged particles can become trapped in the magnetic field and as the planet rotates, these particles are accelerated, producing energy that is released as radio waves. And Beta Pictoris b rotates extremely fast, completing one rotation in just eight to nine hours. That rapid spin helps drive the electrical currents behind its auroral radio emissions. Now the finding could give astronomers a new way to study magnetic fields on distant worlds. Researchers from Harvard's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Oregon say it marks the first direct measurement of an exoplanet's magnetic field strength.