SYDNEY, Oct. 14 -- The galaxy behind the most distant fast radio burst yet traced turned out to be about 1,000 times less massive than the astronomers who found it expected, a mismatch that makes one popular explanation for these flashes unlikely and proves none of the others.

The burst, FRB 20240304B, was detected on March 4, 2024, by the MeerTRAP team using the MeerKAT radio telescope. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope then found its host galaxy with the NIRCam camera and measured a redshift of 2.148 with the NIRSpec spectrograph, placing the burst about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, NASA said. Ewan Barr of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy said in the institute's release that the team "knew immediately that the burst ...