MeerKAT is a radio telescope array in South Africa's Karoo region, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array used for radio astronomy research.
Astronomers led by Manisha Caleb report FRB 20240304B, the most distant fast radio burst yet, emitted about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Its host is a dwarf galaxy 1,000 times less massive than expected, and the team favors a magnetar as the source.
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MeerKAT and JWST traced fast radio burst FRB 20240304B to a galaxy seen 3 billion years after the Big Bang, more than doubling the distance record. The small, star-forming host is one data point for young magnetars as the source of at least some of these flashes.
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Josep Martí and Pedro Luque-Escamilla say IRAS 18293-0941, an object in a 1983 catalog, is a small black hole in our galaxy with a jet aimed at Earth. If it holds up, it ends a search for a nearby blazar that has run for nearly 35 years.
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The team used distant quasars as fixed reference points to separate the planet's signal from its star's, then read a magnetic field of at least 1,250 gauss off the emission. The preprint has not been peer reviewed.
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Astronomers led by IISER Pune's Pavan Vijay Khadekar report four pairs of radio hotspots, aged 4.5 to 20.5 million years, around one elliptical galaxy. Their preprint makes the case for the first known quadruple-double radio galaxy, a dated record of one black hole's restarts that wider surveys would need to turn into a rate.
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The enrichment prescriptions cost almost nothing and fit what is known about how breeding gets triggered, but the hatching carrying the argument is one uncontrolled event with three candidate causes.
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