Fabian Jankowski

The night of March 4, 2024. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa catches a millisecond pulse: a fast radio burst coming from a depth of 17.4 gigaparsecs. This is light that traveled 10.5 billion years to reach Earth.

Somewhere deep in space, a radio beacon flashes for a fraction of a second, and then goes dark. Such signals are called fast radio bursts. They come from other galaxies and last from microseconds to milliseconds.