Overview
- The radio flash now called FRB 20240304B was first detected in March 2024 by the MeerTRAP project using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope and was precisely localized by the team.
- Deep infrared imaging and spectroscopy from JWST's NIRCam and NIRSpec measured the host's redshift at z ≈ 2.148, meaning the signal travelled for more than 10 billion years from when the universe was about three billion years old.
- The host is an unusually faint, low‑mass dwarf that is metal poor and forming stars rapidly, with a stellar mass roughly 1,000 times lower than typical FRB hosts reported so far.
- Those host properties make a long‑delay binary neutron‑star merger unlikely for this burst and instead favor a young magnetar formed in a recent massive‑star explosion as the source.
- Teams have secured multi‑year JWST follow‑up and plan coordinated MeerKAT campaigns to build a larger high‑redshift FRB sample that can trace intergalactic electrons and magnetic fields along lines of sight.