A 10-second signal from one of the most distant points in the universe has been detected by humanity, and scientists are still trying to understand its origins.
Two Earth satellites have confirmed that the mysterious signal came from a point 13billion light-years away from Earth, likely coming from an exploding supernova when the universe was only 730million years old.
The farther away something is in space, the longer its light (or signal) takes to reach us, so when humans see a very distant explosion or star, we’re actually looking at what happened there billions of years ago, like a time machine showing us the past.
In this case, scientists believe this high-energy gamma-ray burst, which they’ve named GRB 250314A, came from the earliest supernova ever recorded from the dawn of time.
Gamma rays are invisible and ultra-powerful forms of light. They are the most energetic source of radiation known in the universe, which is produced by massive stellar explosions, appearing as super-bright flashes from our planet.
Scientists are still unsure why this ancient supernova from the early universe looks almost exactly like the exploding stars seen in our nearby modern universe today.
If this explosion is the true source of the signal, researchers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) expect early stars to be bigger, hotter, and produce much more volatile explosions than the mysterious signal suggested.
Andrew Levan, lead author of a new study on the signal from Radboud University in the Netherlands, said: ‘There are only a handful of gamma-ray bursts in the last 50 years that have been detected in the first billion years of the universe. This particular event is very rare and very exciting.’
An artist’s impression of the supernova GRB 250314A as it was exploding during the first billion years after the Big Bang
The signal was first discovered on March 14, 2025, when the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) satellite picked it up as a sudden flash of high-energy light from deep space.
However, two studies on the possible source of this distant signal have just been released.
The probe is a joint project between scientists in France and China designed to spot these kinds of bursts throughout the cosmos.
The signal scientists recorded was a short, powerful burst of gamma rays, which are invisible waves of energy stronger than X-rays and capable of passing straight through the human body, damaging cells, DNA, and tissues.
Since this burst likely came from an exploding star 13billion light-years from Earth, however, the gamma rays that reached Earth were far too weak to pose any danger to people.
This burst lasted only about 10 seconds because gamma-ray bursts are like quick fireworks in space, releasing a huge amount of energy in a very short time before fading away.
Unlike random noise or background static in space, which is constant and weak, these gamma-ray bursts stand out as super-bright, focused beams with a unique pattern that human satellites have been built to recognize.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed the discovery about three and a half months later, during the summer of 2025, by taking detailed pictures and measurements of the fading glow of the explosion, which could still be seen in space.
‘Only Webb could directly show that this light is from a supernova — a collapsing massive star,’ Professor Levan added in a statement from NASA.
Other sources of mysterious space noise like this might include solar flares or cosmic rays, but gamma-ray bursts are much rarer and come from massive events like star explosions that scientists are able to track down billions of years after they take place.
Levan added that JWST is so advanced that scientists believe it’ll be able to find more signals from when the universe was only five percent of its current age, which is roughly 14billion years old now.
To this point, scientists know very little about the first billion years of the universe, what was happening in space during this time, or how stars behaved and died throughout the cosmos.
Until now, it was thought that following the Big Bang, the massive explosion believed to have kickstarted everything in existence, early stars lived much shorter lives and contained fewer elements than stars like our sun do today.
However, in December 2025, the new studies published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics analyzed detailed observations from the Webb Telescope and found that this supernova from 730 million years after the Big Bang had the same brightness and radiation signature as exploding stars billions of years later.
Nial Tanvir, a professor at the University of Leicester in the UK, added: ‘Webb showed that this supernova looks exactly like modern supernovae.’
