A flash from before the Sun existed: astronomers catch the oldest radio burst ever seen

About ten billion years ago, in a galaxy far away, something let off a flash of radio energy so powerful that it is still arriving. Astronomers have now detected that flash and traced it home with the James Webb Space Telescope — the oldest fast radio burst ever found, born when the universe was just three billion years old. 'When the light left the source, the sun didn't exist, the solar system didn't exist, no humans existed,' says co-author Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney. The findings were published in the journal Science.