&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Signal from the early universe: Radio burst travels 10 billion years to reach Earth. It came from a...")
The South African MeerKAT observatory recorded a radio signal from space, or a fast radio burst (FRB), on March 4, 2024. It was super short but equally intriguing. Scientists say that this FRB travelled a whopping 10 billion years to reach us, way before our Sun and Earth were born. The discovery was announced in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server earlier this month after being first presented at the FRB2025 conference in Montreal, Canada, in July. Researchers said that the radio burst originated from a dwarf galaxy undergoing a strong burst of star formation. However, a likely candidate wasn't discovered initially, and it was only revealed after numerous analyses. When FRBs travel from deep space, crossing intergalactic matter, the waves slow down slightly. For longer wavelengths, this process is even stronger.
Also Read: Radio signal that took 8 billion years to reach Earth came from seven interacting galaxies
This is what gave away the age of the radio signal spotted by the South African observatory. Since its dispersion measure was unusually large, it hinted that the signal had travelled from an extremely distant point in space. Scientists turned to the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i, and the MMT Observatory in Arizona to understand where the signal came from. Both instruments failed to detect a host galaxy. When they did not succeed, the James Webb Space Telescope was brought into play and proved a game changer. Its Near-infrared Camera picked up a 28th-magnitude faint light at the burst’s location. This was found to be a dwarf galaxy where young stars were being constantly born.
Understanding the age of the radio burst
The researchers then needed to understand the age of the radio wave. For this, they needed to measure how much the galaxy’s light waves were stretched by cosmic expansion while travelling towards Earth. A team led by Manisha Caleb, University of Sydney, used Webb’s NIRSpec spectrograph to observe this phenomenon and found that the radio signal originated when the universe was only around 3 billion years old.
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What are magnetars?
The team also believes that their observation can help solve the mystery of magnetars that are believed to release these radio bursts. Magnetars are reportedly strongly magnetised neutron stars, and could either form right after a star dies or when two neutron stars merge. Caleb's paper states that the merger is common in older galaxies. However, the radio wave studied by her team originated from a young galaxy, which means the magnetar in this case formed right after a stellar explosion.
