October 11, 2026
The most distant fast radio burst ever — a 10-billion-year flash from the young universe
Artist's illustration by Carl Knox / OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology
A flash of radio light arrived at Earth after more than 10 billion years in transit — and it just shattered the distance record for fast radio bursts.
Fast radio bursts are among the most mysterious phenomena in astronomy: intense pulses of radio energy that last only milliseconds but release enormous amounts of energy. Their origins remain uncertain. The new burst, designated FRB 20240304B, originated when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, more than doubling the previous distance record.
The detection was led by Dr. Manisha Caleb and Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara at the University of Sydney, working with the MeerTRAP project on South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope, which caught the burst back on March 4, 2024. Finding where it came from required a bigger eye: the largest ground-based telescopes saw nothing at the burst's position, so the team turned to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Webb's NIRCam found the host galaxy, and its NIRSpec instrument measured a redshift of 2.148 — pinning the burst to a time just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
A small galaxy with a big clue
The host galaxy turned out to be a surprise: a dwarf galaxy, roughly a thousand times less massive than expected, but one that is furiously forming stars — most of its stars may have formed within just 30 million years. "The galaxy hosting this burst is surprisingly small, metal-poor and undergoing a very active episode of star formation," said co-author Dr. Laura Driessen of the University of Sydney.
That youthfulness is itself a clue. The leading suspects for FRB sources include young magnetars — highly magnetized neutron stars formed when massive stars explode — and the mergers of older neutron stars, which take billions of years to occur. In a galaxy that young and busy, the magnetar story fits far better. "This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant universe," said Caleb. "We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, and we have used that brief flash of radio light to learn about the matter it has traveled through over billions of years."
A beacon for the matter between galaxies
Beyond the record, the burst is a tool. As the radio signal crossed most of cosmic history, it carried information about the vast, otherwise invisible gas and matter between galaxies — material that is extremely difficult to observe any other way. In principle, sufficiently powerful bursts could even be detected from the very early universe, giving astronomers a new way to study both galaxy evolution and the hidden scaffolding of the cosmos.
The team is already looking further back. "The next step is to push this frontier further and see how close we can get to the first generations of stars," said co-author Professor Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester, principal investigator of MeerTRAP at MeerKAT.
Notably, this same Sydney group was involved in the discovery of the previous most-distant fast radio burst back in 2023. They keep breaking their own record.
The study is published in Science (2026).
Source: Phys.org — read the original report
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