Hubble photographs home of farthest fast radio burst (annotated)

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the host galaxy of an exceptionally powerful Fast Radio Burst, FRB20220610A. Hubble’s sensitivity and sharpness reveals a compact group of multiple galaxies that may be in the process of merging. They existed when the Universe was only 5 billion years old. FRB 20220610A was first detected on June 10, 2022 by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia, and confirmed to come from a distant origin by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

[Image description: This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a field of blue, red, orange, yellow and white distant galaxies against the black backdrop of space. At image centre, a white inset box labelled “Host galaxy of FRB 20220610A” zooms in on a tight group of several galaxies of various elliptical shapes (to the far right). The white arrow inside the inset box points to the host galaxy of the exceptionally powerful fast radio burst 20220610A detected inside this galaxy group.]