Astronomers discover record-breaking ancient cosmic outburst
Detected by the MeerKAT array, this “fast radio burst” comes from three billion years after the big bang and could help map the universe’s otherwise-invisible intergalactic matter
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At some point around three billion years after the big bang, some celestial object in a faraway galaxy suddenly went pop and shot out a brief-but-powerful blast of radio waves, lasting just a fraction of a second. That blast kept traveling across the intergalactic vastness of space and time until, in March 2024, it breezed by Earth, with a small fraction of its energy trickling into the dishes of the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa.
For Themiya Nanayakkara, an astronomer at Australia’s University of Sydney, MeerKAT’s detection was a moment of peak excitement. Fast radio bursts…
