October 11, 2026
A 10-billion-year-old flash just broke the distance record
Illustration: Carl Knox / OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology
Fast radio bursts are one of astronomy's stubbornest mysteries: millisecond flashes of radio waves that release enormous energy, with their origins still uncertain. This week, astronomers announced the most distant one ever recorded — a flash that traveled for roughly 10 to 11 billion years before reaching Earth, more than doubling the previous distance record.
The catch
The burst, designated FRB 20240304B, was spotted by South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope through the MeerTRAP project. A precise distance was only possible once the team found the galaxy the burst came from — which proved fiendishly hard. Archival images and follow-up with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii and Arizona's MMT Observatory all came up empty.
The breakthrough came from director's discretionary time on the James Webb Space Telescope. JWST's sensitive infrared camera revealed a faint, 28th-magnitude dwarf galaxy at the burst's position, and its spectrograph measured a redshift of 2.15 — corresponding to a light-travel time of about 11 billion years. The burst fired off when the universe was only around 3 billion years old.
Lead researcher Dr. Manisha Caleb (University of Sydney, with collaborator Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara) had actually announced the find at a conference in Montreal in July 2025; it stayed under embargo until publication in the journal Science this week (DOI: 10.1126/science.adz2675).
A clue about origins
The host galaxy turned out to be small, metal-poor, and in the middle of an intense burst of star formation. That's an important clue: young starburst galaxies should harbor many neutron stars, which fits the popular magnetar hypothesis — that at least some FRBs come from young, ultra-magnetized neutron stars born when massive stars explode as supernovas.
Why it matters
Beyond the record, the burst acted as a cosmic beacon. As the radio signal traveled across most of cosmic history, it carried information about the vast, otherwise invisible gas and matter between galaxies — material that's extremely hard to observe directly.
As one co-author put it, bursts like this could in principle be detectable from the very early universe — meaning astronomers may soon be reading radio flashes from nearly the first generations of stars.
The mystery, of course, remains. We're now hearing flashes from the young universe — and we still don't fully know what makes them.
Source: Phys.org (reporting a Science paper) — read the original report
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