Astronomers have detected a mysterious flash of radio waves that traveled across the universe for more than 10 billion years. Lasting just milliseconds, the powerful signal is the most distant fast radio burst ever detected. It originated when the universe was only about three billion years old.

Called FRB 20240304B, the signal smashes the previous distance record for a fast radio burst.

What Is A Fast Radio Burst?

Fast radio bursts are extremely brief, but powerful flashes of radio waves coming from deep space. Typically lasting just a few milliseconds, they can release enormous amounts of energy. First discovered in 2007, their exact origins remain one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries.

Thousands are thought to occur across the sky each day, but finding precisely where they come from — and therefore how far their signals have traveled — is difficult.

FRB 20240304B changes that. “This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant Universe,” said Dr. Manisha Caleb at the University of Sydney, who led the research with Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara and published their research this week in Science . “We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the Universe was only about three billion years old.”

A 10-Billion-Year-Old Cosmic Signal

The MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 dish antennas in the remote Karoo region of the Northern Cape, South Africa, detected the burst as part of the MeerTRAP project. But finding the origin of FRB 20240304B wasn’t so easy because the galaxy it traveled from is so distant that it is invisible to even the largest ground-based telescopes. Astronomers instead turned to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, whose infrared observations allowed them to identify the galaxy and measure its distance.

What they found was unexpected. “The galaxy hosting this burst is surprisingly small, metal-poor and undergoing a very active episode of star formation,” said Dr. Laura Driessen at the University of Sydney. That could provide an important clue to what creates FRBs.

Could A Magnetar Be Responsible?

It’s not known for sure what cause fast radio bursts. Neutron stars are the rapidly spinning, dense remnants left behind after massive stars explode as supernovas. Astronomers suspect that at least some fast radio bursts come from magnetars — extreme types of neutron stars that spin so rapidly they create the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.

The newly identified galaxy is producing many new stars, making it the kind of environment where magnetars could form. That makes the discovery more consistent with the magnetar explanation than theories involving mergers between much older neutron stars.

The discovery surpasses a record set in 2023 by FRB 20220610A, whose signal took about eight billion years to reach Earth. That burst lasted less than a millisecond, yet during that tiny fraction of a second it released the equivalent of the sun’s total energy output over 30 years.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.