The reporting

2 articles

Topic: fast radio bursts

Webb NIRCam image showing the faint dwarf host galaxy of fast radio burst FRB 20240304B, with an inset zoom and a white crosshair marking the burst location

NEWS Space and Aerospace

Webb Traces the Most Distant Fast Radio Burst to a Dwarf Galaxy, Challenging the Merger Theory

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to identify the host galaxy of FRB 20240304B, the most distant fast radio burst ever measured, at redshift 2.148, about 3 billion years after the big bang. The host is a small, star-forming dwarf galaxy about 1,000 times less massive than expected, a result that weighs against neutron-star mergers and favors young magnetars as the source of these millisecond flashes.

Graph of extragalactic fast-radio-burst dispersion measure against source redshift over a modeled probability distribution

ANALYSIS Space

Fast Radio Bursts Add a New Constraint on Cosmic Matter Clustering

A 114-burst analysis uses variations in radio-wave delay to infer how ionized gas reshapes matter clustering. The result adds an independent cosmological probe, but it remains dependent on halo models, host corrections and assumed cosmology.