A flash lasting milliseconds. A journey spanning cosmic history. And two astronomers who helped uncover its origins.
By Publisher Ray Carmen
More than ten billion years ago — long before the Sun or Earth existed — a fleeting pulse of radio waves left a small galaxy in the early universe. In March 2024, that pulse reached a telescope in South Africa. By October 2026, an international team had identified the galaxy it came from, delivering a landmark result for modern astronomy — with Sri Lankan astrophysicist Dr Themiya Nanayakkara playing a leading role.
THE SIGNAL THAT CROSSED THE AGES
The signal, known to astronomers as FRB 20240304B, is a fast radio burst: an exceptionally brief, intense flash of radio emission. It was recorded on 4 March 2024 by the MeerTRAP project using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The flash lasted only milliseconds, but the information encoded in its radio waves pointed to an extraordinary journey.
Researchers concluded that the burst originated around 10.6 billion years ago, when the universe was roughly three billion years old. It is the most distant fast radio burst yet securely associated with its host galaxy — more than twice the previous record in lookback time, according to the University of Sydney.
THE SRI LANKAN SCIENTIST — AND THE TEAM BEHIND THE DISCOVERY
Dr Themiya Nanayakkara is a Sri Lankan astrophysicist and senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. He specialises in using powerful telescopes to investigate how galaxies formed and evolved during the universe’s early history.
His wife and research colleague, Indian-born radio astronomer Dr Manisha Caleb, was the first author of the study and led its radio-astronomy work. Nanayakkara was the second author and led the James Webb Space Telescope observations and analysis used to find and characterise the burst’s faint host galaxy. Their contribution formed part of a much larger international collaboration.
In an interview with Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times, Nanayakkara described the discovery as the couple’s first scientific collaboration, despite years of working in astronomy. The tale is remarkable not simply for its scientific record, but for the international teamwork that made it possible.
WHY NASA’S WEBB TELESCOPE WAS ESSENTIAL
After MeerKAT identified the direction of the burst, the team needed to find its host galaxy to measure the distance reliably. Even large ground-based telescopes could not detect the faint source. The scientists turned to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Webb’s infrared camera revealed a tiny galaxy at the burst’s location. Its spectrograph measured a redshift of 2.148, placing the galaxy about three billion years after the Big Bang. The team found an unexpectedly small, actively star-forming galaxy — not the massive system they had anticipated.
A MESSAGE FROM ALIENS? NO — BUT A CLUE TO THE COSMOS
This was not a decoded message or a deliberate transmission from an extraterrestrial civilisation. A fast radio burst is a natural astronomical phenomenon, and its exact source mechanism has not been conclusively established. One important possibility is a magnetar: an extraordinarily magnetised neutron star.
As radio waves travel billions of years through space, electrically charged matter affects their arrival times and polarisation. Those changes provide clues about gas, magnetic fields and the vast “cosmic web” extending between galaxies. This makes distant bursts valuable tools for learning about matter that is otherwise difficult to see.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The research, published in Science on 8 October 2026, shows that researchers can trace these fleeting cosmic flashes back to the era when the universe was producing stars at extraordinary rates. Finding more such bursts may enable astronomers to map the early universe with unprecedented precision.
For Sri Lanka, Nanayakkara’s part in the discovery offers an inspiring example of how scientific expertise can travel the world — and then help humanity look almost all the way back through cosmic history.