Record-Breaking Natural Laser Discovered 11 Billion Light-Years Away
Lasers aren’t only produced by humans here on Earth, but occur naturally in space as masers and, more powerfully, as megamasers.
While mapping out the neutral hydrogen in the Universe, the MeerKAT array serendipitously discovered the most distant megamaser ever in 2022, located 6.6 billion light-years away.
Now, that record has been broken again here in 2026, with a new gravitationally lensed megamaser shattering all prior records, yielding a discovery a whopping 11 billion light-years distant.