using the Parkes telescope in 2007<\/a>.<\/p>\nDespite astronomers finding hundreds since then, Dr Caleb said we do not know what produces them.<\/p>\n
“We know there are thousands of these events that go off in the sky every day,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And because they occur at radio wavelengths they are invisible to the human eye.”<\/p>\n
Lasting only a few milliseconds, they produce an immense amount of energy.<\/p>\n
“In those few milliseconds, they emit as much energy as the Sun would over several days,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ryan Shannon, an astrophysicist from Swinburne University who has discovered other FRBs, said one potential source could be a magnetar, a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field.<\/p>\n
“We found there’s a magnetar in our own galaxy that emitted a pulse which looked like an FRB,” Professor Shannon said.<\/p>\n
“But I wouldn’t rule out having more than one way to produce an FRB.”<\/p>\n
What is FRB 20240304B?<\/p>\n
The newly discovered FRB was recorded in 2024 by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, which is reflected in its name.<\/p>\n
“The B means it was the second FRB to be discovered that day,” Dr Caleb said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know who discovered the first one, but I like to think ours is way cooler.”<\/p>\n
![\"Manisha](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/21bc8f4e6d821010e125f59082cbe9bd.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Manisha Caleb (left) and co-author Themiya Nanayakkara lead an international team of researchers on the new study. (Supplied: Stefanie Zingsheim)<\/p>\n
The team’s FRB had a very high “dispersion measure” (DM), meaning the light travelled a long way before being captured.<\/p>\n
“Typically we find [FRBs with] a few hundred DM, or maybe even a thousand,” Dr Caleb said.<\/p>\n
“With about 2,400 units of DM we figured it had to be coming from really far away.”<\/p>\n
The team then used the James Webb Space Telescope to pinpoint where the FRB came from, homing in on a galaxy that existed just 3 billion years after the big bang.<\/p>\n
“The galaxy itself was surprisingly small,” Dr Caleb said.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t expect to find the FRB to be associated with such a puny little dwarf galaxy that’s actively forming stars.”<\/p>\n
How can FRBs map the cosmic web?<\/p>\n
Professor Shannon, who was not involved in the study, said the discovery “pushed the frontiers of FRBs”.<\/p>\n
“One of the big achievements was that this was an FRB that [they] could pinpoint its location on the sky,” he said.<\/p>\n
NASA’s Curiosity rover captures dawn on Mars<\/a><\/p>\nNASA has released a striking image of dawn on the Martian surface taken by its Curiosity rover, showing sunlight bathing jagged crags formed billions of years ago.<\/p>\n
He also noted that dispersion from these far-flung FRBs could be useful to map the cosmic web.<\/p>\n
This skeleton-like framework can tell us how the universe evolved.<\/p>\n
“The majority of the normal matter in the universe, the stuff that Earth, you and I are made of \u2026 is spread out in the cosmic web,” Professor Shannon said.<\/p>\n
“We’re able to use the FRBs now to study the cosmic web in ways that were impossible before.”<\/p>\n
Just even clocking this ancient flash was exciting.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got this brief flash, lasting milliseconds, and here we are billions of years later lucky enough to catch it,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before our solar system formed, a millisecond flash of light with a huge amount of energy erupted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":920882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,13263,83922,66602,221937,185445,488744,352495,128,285,20374],"class_list":["post-920881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-big-bang","tag-cosmic-web","tag-fast-radio-burst","tag-frb","tag-meerkat","tag-parkes-telescope","tag-redshift","tag-science","tag-space","tag-universe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920881","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=920881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1c9d7746d523131458f35fc07f579532.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n