By Olivier Acuña Barba •
Published: 27 Aug 2025 • 13:43
• 2 minutes read
Scientists used the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on the origin of the March 16 FRB called RBFLOAT Credit: NASA/Press Gallery
Astronomers have once again detected a mysterious fast radio burst (FRB) from deep space that could be evidence of advanced alien life. The FRBs were first detected by accident in 2007, but their origin remains unknown.
The recent FRBs from another galaxy were detected on March 16 and therefore tagged FRB20250316A, although astronomers nicknamed it “RBFLOAT” because it has been the “Radio Brightest Flash Of All Time.”
The signal was traced to the galaxy NGC 4141, about 130 million light-years away from Earth. The details of the detection, made with the FRB-hunting Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, and its newly operational, smaller array of telescopes, called Outriggers, were published Thursday, August 21, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “With the CHIME Outriggers, we are finally catching these fleeting cosmic signals in the act, narrowing down their locations not only to individual galaxies, but even to specific stellar environments,” said lead study author Amanda Cook, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the Trottier Space Institute and Physics Department at McGill University.
A unique opportunity for astronomers
After the burst was detected, scientists used NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on its origin. The observations provide evidence to support a leading theory that magnetars, or highly magnetised remnants of dead stars, could be a source of fast radio bursts. A study about Webb’s follow-up observations was also published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This was a unique opportunity to quickly turn JWST’s powerful infrared eye on the location of an FRB for the first time,” said Peter Blanchard, lead author of the Webb study and research associate in the Harvard College Observatory at the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in a statement.
“And we were rewarded with an exciting result, we see a faint source of infrared light very close to where the radio burst occurred. This could be the first object linked to an FRB that anyone has found in another galaxy,” Blanchard added. The infrared object located by the RBFLOAT source has been dubbed NIR-1, and it is believed to be a red giant star or a middle-aged massive star. But whatever NIR-1 is, it is unlikely to be the cause of RBFLOAT. Red giants and massive stars aren’t generally associated with phenomena that could trigger such an outburst, Space reported.
Could they be from advanced alien civilisations?
The origin of FRBs remains unknown, but most scientists believe they are generated by powerful astrophysical phenomena emanating from billions of light-years outside our galaxy, the Milky Way, such as the merger of black holes or super-dense neutron stars.
Others, however, including Prof Avi Loeb, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, have more outlandish theories, suggesting they could be evidence of incredibly advanced alien technology.
In 2017, Loeb and his Harvard colleague Manasvi Lingam proposed that FRBs could be leakage from planet-sized alien transmitters. Rather than being designed for communication, they would more likely be used to propel giant spaceships powered by light sails, which bounce light, or in this case, radio beams, off a massive reflective sheet to provide thrust.
“Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,” said Loeb in a statement after the publication of a previous paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.
