If they were related, that would neatly solve two major mysteries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But FRBs are bursts of radio waves from the distant cosmos, generally lasting for tiny fractions of a second (i.e., fast).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their transience, and the fact that they randomly appear across the sky, have made it difficult to pin down their origins for nearly two decades<\/a> since their discovery in 2007.<\/p>\n But we just got a huge clue: Astronomers have reported the most distant FRB<\/a> yet, designated FRB 20240304B, a burst of ancient energy that was emitted in one-thousandth of a second<\/a> and has traveled through 80 percent of the Universe’s history<\/a> to meet us. <\/p>\n “What makes fast radio bursts interesting is that we don’t know what generates them,” explains<\/a> lead author Manisha Caleb, a radio astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of Sydney. <\/p>\n “We have theories for what objects produce them, but we don’t have conclusive proof.”<\/p>\n So, who’s the cosmic culprit in this specific case? Possibly a magnetar: a type of neutron star<\/a> on steroids that packs the most powerful magnetic fields in the Universe and squeezes the mass of a whole Sun into a magnetic marble the size of San Francisco Bay<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet here’s another conundrum: despite their incomprehensibly intense origins, and their ability to release 500 million Suns’ worth of energy in thousandths of a second<\/a>, they may be light(er)weights compared to other stellar outbursts, which has led to a sampler platter of possibilities and added to the difficulty of their conclusive identification:<\/p>\n “We observationalists can only kill models, never prove them. So, when you have 100 to kill, it takes a fair bit of time.” \u2013 astronomer and astrophysicist J. Xavier Prochaska<\/p>\n “Fundamentally, it is because the energies involved are modest. They are extreme for radio wave emission, but nothing like the energy in a supernova or gamma-ray burst,” J. Xavier Prochaska, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told ScienceAlert.<\/p>\n “As such, theorists have devised nearly 100 models to generate them.<\/p>\n “We observationalists can only kill models, never prove them. So, when you have 100 to kill, it takes a fair bit of time.”<\/p>\n In the study, published in the journal Science<\/a>, a massive, international collaboration of astronomers used multiple observatories to explore this mysterious FRB emanating from ‘cosmic noon,’ an era only 3 billion years after the Big Bang<\/a> when Universal star formation was at its peak.<\/p>\n The astronomers identified the FRB in March 2024 using MeerKAT<\/a>, a 64-antenna radio telescope in South Africa’s Meerkat National Park. <\/p>\n They then pointed two ultra-sensitive ground telescopes at the corresponding patch of sky to see its host galaxy and discovered\u2026 darkness.\u00a0<\/p>\n They looked as deep as they could “but there was simply nothing to see,” Prochaska says<\/a>. <\/p>\n So they called in the heavy orbital artillery (just a metaphor, for now), the JWST and its exceptional infrared sensitivity. <\/p>\n And if the researchers suspected a monster, they found a mouse:<\/p>\n “We thought it would be a big, nicely formed galaxy with lots of stars, and instead it was a little dwarf galaxy, although it was actively forming stars,” says<\/a> Caleb.<\/p>\n Altogether, this dwarf galaxy is 1,000 times less massive than expected<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s also exceedingly young, with 90 percent of its stellar mass having formed in the past 30 million years.\u00a0<\/p>\n This helped the astronomers favor a magnetar as the potential source of the historic FRB.<\/p>\n Another prominent FRB scenario involves the collision of two neutron stars, a cataclysmic crash that yields a black hole<\/a> or an extra-heavy neutron star<\/a>, plus a bunch of literal gold<\/a>. <\/p>\n Yet neutron stars dance around each other for billions of years before colliding, like a still-shy couple on a second date, so it wouldn’t make sense in a young galaxy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Magnetars, however, can form and release their magnetic energy in just millions of years. Especially in a metal-poor galaxy like this that breeds massive stars. <\/p>\n Also, like good guests, FRBs come bearing gifts of the astrophysical kind. <\/p>\n Even though light travels at the speed of itself<\/a>, the ultimate breakneck physical limit, it only does so in a vacuum. <\/p>\n And as this FRB passed through the cold, ionized (electrically charged) gas that permeates the cosmos, its lower-frequency waves were slowed more than its higher ones, so they arrived later. <\/p>\n Turbulent gas, most likely in its home galaxy, also scattered the signal, smearing it out over several milliseconds<\/p>\n FRBs thus act as an astronomical flashlight<\/a>, and this particular one has had its signal warped by two cosmic-scale structures as it traversed most of the Universe to meet us.\u00a0<\/p>\n In doing so, it helped illuminate an unknown galaxy group along the way, located about 3.5 billion light-years away, while also bearing the ionic imprint of the Virgo Cluster, the nearest such structure to Earth, only around 54 million light-years distant.<\/p>\n Finally, since we only know of about 100 FRBs whose host galaxies have been confirmed, the researchers note<\/a>, and most are billions of light-years more local, this wasn’t just the cherry atop the celestial sundae, but a whole other sundae on top of the sundae. <\/p>\n “Because we have scant understanding of what generates FRBs, we could only hope that they might exist at such early times,” Prochaska told ScienceAlert. <\/p>\n “Now, we have proven it and this will drive new, dedicated studies to find others \u2013 and search even greater distances!”<\/p>\n The research has been published in Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer<\/a> and edited by Rebecca Dyer<\/a>. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes we receive strange, ghostly radio signals from outer space, which astronomers have yet to conclusively explain. Partially…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[1352,79],"class_list":["post-879980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-msft-content","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Most](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/FRBs_600.gif\")
Fast radio bursts<\/a> arrive from all positions in the sky. (NRAO Outreach\/Vimeo<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"Most](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/STScI-01KKCJGBWX6TE4ABRTFWE9B8SQ-775x675.jpg\")
The JWST was able to detect the host galaxy of FRB 20240304B, as shown by the inset. (NASA\/ESA\/CSA\/STScI\/Themiya Nanayakkara (USYD); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"Most](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/STScI-01KKBYH5R2ACPDJF5SSX6N3FPJ-1200x675.jpg\")
The different wavelengths emitted by the galaxy, such as those of oxygen and hydrogen, allowed astronomers to determine redshift<\/a> and therefore trace the galaxy back to cosmic noon. (NASA\/ESA\/CSA\/Joseph Olmsted (STScI); Science: Manisha Caleb (SIfA)<\/a>)<\/p>\n