Astronomers detect mysterious burst of energy from a galaxy far, far away

Intense flash of radio waves is more than 10bn years old and has travelled through ‘approximately 80% of cosmic history’

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a mysterious flash of energy was released into the universe.

FRBs are intense bursts of radio waves that can emit as much energy in milliseconds as the sun does in months or years. These mysterious pulses were first discovered in 2007 and have puzzled scientists ever since, with speculation from some that they could have an alien origin.

The burst, dubbed FRB 20240304B, is believed to be the farthest yet detected, more than double the previous distance record.

Dr Themiya Nanayakkara of the University of Sydney, one of the lead researchers on the paper, said when the burst was produced, “there was no Earth, there was no sun”.

There are several theories as to what the source of FRBs is, including that they originate from magnetars, neutron stars with a very powerful magnetic field.

More than 10,000 FRBs have been detected since 2007. Some repeat continuously, Nanayakkara said, while “some of them repeat for a while and then stop … and then there are some FRBs that only go once and we never see again”.

But “the fun thing about FRBs is that we don’t need to know what is causing them to do some of the science we are doing now,” Nanayakkara said.

Prof Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University, one of the astrophysicists who first discovered FRBs, described the new paper as “a validation of how powerful the FRBs are for probing the universe”.

Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist also at Swinburne University who was not involved in the research, said: “You can use them essentially as a line-of-sight count for how much matter they had to go through [to get to Earth].”