Wen-fai Fong

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.

Radio waves from a gamma-ray burst — the cataclysmic death of a massive star whose flash briefly outshines an entire galaxy — reach Earth polarized. This means their electric field oscillates predominantly in a single plane, like a compass needle frozen in a magnetic field.

For almost twenty years, FRB (fast radio bursts) have intrigued astrophysicists — millisecond shrieks from the depths of space, carrying the energy of millions of Suns.

In 2007, astronomers heard a mysterious millisecond click from space — that's how fast radio bursts, or FRBs, were discovered. Since then, they've become a cosmic-scale detective story: as bright as an entire galaxy and compressed into an instant, these signals race through the Universe at the speed of light.