@drbecky_s: Fast Radio Bursts: These are another as yet unexplained observation of the Universe, but thanks to JWST this month we’ve gotten a step closer to understanding what they are. So FRBs were first spotted in 2007, as incredibly bright, very short millisecond flashes of radio waves. They give off more energy in that tiny short burst than the Sun does in an entire day. Now back in March 2024, the MeerTRAP team using the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa detected a FRB dubbed 20240304B. And the data from this burst suggested that it was extremely distant, possibly the most distant one seen to date. Because although they knew the direction the FRB was coming from very precisely, the world’s largest ground-based telescopes could not see any galaxy at that spot in the sky, suggesting it was incredibly far away. So they applied to use the JWST to try and spot the galaxy this FRB was coming from, and found a galaxy there 10.6 billion light years away. Because light takes time to get to us we’re seeing that galaxy as it was when the Universe was just 3 billion years old, when star formation was at its peak. The hope is that the MEERkat telescope will detect more of these distant FRBs, so we can get more of a census on the properties of the galaxies they’re found in, and hopefully learn more about what’s actually producing these incredibly high energy bursts of radio light. Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst #jwst #astrotok #space #galaxies #universe

Dr Becky Smethurst

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Thursday 29 October 2026 17:54:00 GMT