Saturday, October 3, 2026
First direct radio detection from an exoplanet: Beta Pictoris b (MeerKAT array, South Africa; Harvard & Smithsonian team led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos; arXiv preprint posted mid-Sept 2026, not yet peer reviewed; repeating auroral radio bursts via electron cyclotron maser instability; planet's magnetic field ~1,250 gauss, hundreds of times stronger than Jupiter's; 63 light-years away; 9–13x Jupiter's mass; orbits 8x Earth-Sun distance; 24-year orbit; system 23 million years old; emission localized to planet using distant quasars as reference points; not aliens) Fervo Energy's Cape Station (Beaver
Transcript
The full episode script, for reading or reference: