Astronomers find farthest FRB 20240304B with MeerKAT and James Webb
Astronomers just caught an extremely distant fast radio burst (FRB 20240304B) that traveled over 11 billion years to reach us, the farthest one ever found.
Using South Africa's MeerKAT telescope and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they got a rare peek at a galaxy from when the universe was only three billion years old.
Young dwarf galaxy challenges FRB origins
The burst came from a small, surprisingly young dwarf galaxy that formed most of its stars relatively recently, very different from what scientists expected.
This shakes up old ideas about where these mysterious bursts come from and suggests they might start in places we didn't think of before, like around magnetars (highly magnetic neutron stars).
Besides being cool, space-detective work, discoveries like this help us understand how galaxies evolved billions of years ago.