Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date

An international team has spotted a remote blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond.

This 'fast radio burst' (FRB) is the most distant ever detected. Its source was pinned down by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us.

The FRB is also one of the most energetic ever observed; in a tiny fraction of a second it released the equivalent of our Sun’s total emission over 30 years.

The discovery of the burst, named FRB 20220610A, was made in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia and it smashed the team’s previous distance record by 50 percent.

Read more about this stunning observation in this ESO article.