{"id":160824,"date":"2025-09-22T10:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/160824\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T10:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T10:33:09","slug":"radio-signal-traveled-10-billion-years-and-just-reached-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/160824\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio signal traveled 10 billion years and just reached Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

A radio flash from the distant universe arrived after about 10 billion years in flight. Astronomers call it FRB 20240304B, a fast radio burst (FRB<\/a>) that lasted only a few thousandths of a second.<\/p>\n

These bursts are brief, bright, and packed with clues about the gas and magnetic fields between their source and Earth. They matter because each one carries a fingerprint of the matter it passed through.<\/p>\n

Studying FRB 20240304B
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The study reports FRB 20240304B at a redshift of 2.148, which means the burst left when the universe was only about 3 billion years old. <\/p>\n

Redshift describes how light stretches as space expands, shifting radio<\/a> waves to longer wavelengths with distance, and the team presented the detection, the host galaxy, and the physical inferences in their paper.<\/p>\n

Manisha Caleb<\/a> of the University of Sydney<\/a> led the international collaboration that used the MeerKAT<\/a> radio telescope in South Africa. <\/p>\n

Her team localized the burst and then used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST<\/a>) to confirm the host galaxy.<\/p>\n

FRBs show a frequency dependent delay that reveals the dispersion measure (DM<\/a>) along the line of sight. That delay encodes how many free electrons the pulse encountered before it reached our instruments.<\/p>\n

A high dispersion measure points to a long journey through diffuse ionized gas. This is why the team pursued deep imaging and spectroscopy to find a very faint, faraway host.<\/p>\n

How the burst was caught<\/p>\n

FRB 20240304B was found on March 4, 2024, during a targeted transient search on MeerKAT. The burst had a peak flux near 0.49 jansky and a scattering time of about 5.6 milliseconds at 1.0 gigahertz across the observed band.<\/p>\n

The detection relied on the MeerTRAP program<\/a> and its Transient User Supplied Equipment (TUSE<\/a>). <\/p>\n

That system performs real time searches on MeerKAT<\/a> and enables precise follow up, and it captures triggered voltage data that make accurate positions possible.<\/p>\n

Coherent beamforming across many dishes concentrates sensitivity and sharpens the sky position. That capability is crucial when the burst itself lasts only a blink and leaves no afterglow.<\/p>\n

The burst was highly linearly polarized at 49 percent and showed only about 3 percent circular polarization. <\/p>\n

Those properties help researchers probe magnetic environments near the source and along the sightline.<\/p>\n

Why cosmic noon matters<\/p>\n

The burst came from a time nicknamed \u201ccosmic noon,\u201d when the universe was forming stars at its fastest rate. <\/p>\n

Astronomers see a peak in the cosmic star formation history<\/a> about 10 to 11 billion years ago, and this event sits in that era.<\/p>\n

Finding an FRB there matters for more than a date on a timeline. It shows that whatever powers FRBs was active when young galaxies were busy building their stars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery doubles the redshift reach of localized FRBs. Our observations establish FRB activity during the peak of cosmic star formation\u201d wrote Caleb.<\/p>\n

What the host galaxy tells us<\/p>\n

The host is a low mass, clumpy, star forming dwarf with only about ten million solar masses in stars. It forms roughly 0.2 solar masses of new stars each year and has a metallicity around 10 to 20 percent of the Sun.<\/p>\n

Those traits point to short delays between stellar birth and FRB activity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Young neutron stars with enormous magnetic fields, called magnetars, are a leading candidate because they can form quickly after massive stars explode.<\/p>\n

As further evidence, a radio<\/a> flash from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154<\/a> showed that magnetars can make millisecond bursts of FRB like power.<\/p>\n

The FRB was localized with help from JWST<\/a> spectroscopy that measured strong emission lines at the host position. <\/p>\n

That enabled an accurate redshift and energy estimate for the burst without guessing the distance.<\/p>\n

For its size, the rate of new star formation is intense compared with typical dwarfs at the same mass. That context strengthens the case that a recent massive star created a compact remnant that powers the burst.<\/p>\n

FRBs and magnetism<\/p>\n

The burst\u2019s linear polarization let the team measure a rotation measure of about minus 55.6 radians per square meter. <\/p>\n

Combined with the dispersion measure, that implies a weak average line of sight magnetic field, or a tangle of fields that cancel.<\/p>\n

The data also show that the sightline crosses structures like the Virgo Cluster<\/a> and a foreground group, which can add to the dispersion. <\/p>\n

Accounting for those foregrounds helps isolate what belongs to the host galaxy and local environment.<\/p>\n

Low-net Faraday rotation<\/a>, despite a large dispersion measure, hints at multiple regions with opposing field directions. That pattern fits a complex medium in the host or along the path where fields reverse and partly cancel.<\/p>\n

FRB 20240304B advances astronomy<\/p>\n

FRBs are also tools. They turn the universe into a laboratory for counting matter and mapping magnetism.<\/p>\n

The way dispersion grows with distance follows the Macquart relation<\/a>, which links the pulse delay to the amount of plasma in intergalactic space. <\/p>\n

That relation has already helped track the missing baryons that were hard to count in the thin intergalactic medium.<\/p>\n

A single well measured FRB at high redshift stretches that yardstick deeper into cosmic time and puts new constraints on how much ordinary matter lies between galaxies. <\/p>\n

This burst shows that our telescopes can reach into the early universe with enough sensitivity to localize the source.<\/p>\n

It also shows that small, vigorously star forming galaxies can host powerful radio<\/a> engines. The discovery adds a new anchor for population studies and survey design.<\/p>\n

It raises the odds that the next generation of radio arrays will build a dense grid of sightlines that cross the cosmic web at many distances. That is how FRBs become a practical tool for mapping the matter between galaxies.<\/p>\n

The study is published in arXiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image credit: van Leeuwen\/ASTRON.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2013<\/p>\n

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Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A radio flash from the distant universe arrived after about 10 billion years in flight. Astronomers call it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-160824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}