A flash from the universe's childhood just broke a distance record

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope caught a millisecond-long burst of radio waves that had traveled more than 10 billion years to reach Earth. The Webb telescope then tracked down its home: a tiny, star-making dwarf galaxy from when the universe was only 3 billion years old — more than doubling the previous distance record. The galaxy's youth points to a young magnetar, a fiercely magnetic collapsed star, as the likely source.