Overview
- The radio pulse FRB 20240304B was first detected by the MeerTRAP project with the MeerKAT telescope on March 4, 2024, and its precise radio localization enabled follow-up searches.
- Deep infrared imaging and spectroscopy with JWST’s NIRCam identified the host and the team measured a spectroscopic redshift of z = 2.148 in a Science paper published online October 8, 2026.
- The host is an extremely low-mass, metal-poor dwarf that is actively forming stars and is about 10 billion light-years away, placing the burst near the epoch called cosmic noon.
- The galaxy’s youth and star formation make a long-delay binary neutron-star merger unlikely and instead favor a young magnetar — a recently born, highly magnetized neutron star — as the burst source.
- The result validates the MeerKAT–JWST observational pairing, motivates building a larger sample of high-redshift FRB hosts, and promises new probes of the intergalactic medium and galaxy evolution.