Nasa receives 10-second signal sent 13 billion years ago

The sound, when it finally arrived, was nothing like what anyone expected. It wasn’t a dramatic burst of noise or some cosmic drumroll pounding through NASA’s deep-space headphones. It was data—ten seconds of impossibly faint rhythm, a whisper of energy that had started its journey before Earth had even dreamed of oceans, forests, or people to listen. By the time it reached us, thirteen billion years later, it carried with it the weight of almost all of time.

A Whisper From Almost the Beginning

Imagine a night so clear you can see the Milky Way spill across the sky like powdered glass. Now imagine that every star you see, every shimmering grain in that river of light, is a latecomer. The signal NASA scientists picked up comes from an age before most of those stars were even born, from a universe still stumbling out of its cosmic childhood.

It began as a blip—one more anomaly inside an ocean of static readings. Most such blips are boring: a misfiring sensor, a passing satellite, a bit of interference from Earthly technology. But this one had a peculiar steadiness. It sat in the data like a heartbeat hidden inside white noise, a ten-second pattern so faint it nearly drowned in the background hum of the cosmos.

Inside a dimly lit operations room, banks of monitors glowed a cold blue. Coffee steamed in forgotten cups. The air crackled with a quiet intensity as software routines swept through terabytes of incoming noise, searching for anything that didn’t quite belong. When the program flagged the signal—just ten seconds long, buried in a dataset spanning weeks—an alert blinked on a single screen. A junior analyst, eyes half-tired, clicked it open out of habit more than curiosity.

Those ten seconds changed their night. Then, in slow increments, they changed their sense of time itself.

The Longest Journey a Signal Can Take

To understand why this signal matters, you have to stretch your imagination across distances that sound more like myth than measurement. Thirteen billion years isn’t just a number—it’s a timeline that almost reaches back to the Big Bang itself.

Our universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old. That means the energy NASA detected began traveling when the cosmos was less than a billion years into its existence. Galaxies were just beginning to take shape. The first generations of stars—giant, hot, and short-lived—were burning through their lives in wild, luminous bursts. Space wasn’t the quiet darkness we know, but an unsettled sea of matter, light, and gravity, still echoing with the aftershocks of creation.

Light and radio waves move at a fixed speed: about 300,000 kilometers per second. That feels fast until you weigh it against the scale of the universe. At that speed, the signal had to cross expanding space, thread between newborn galaxies, and endure the slow stretching of the universe itself. The wavelengths that left their source were not the same ones that arrived here; they grew thinner, redder, more fragile, pulled like taffy by cosmic expansion.

By the time those ten seconds of energy brushed past Earth and into NASA’s receivers, they were like a voice calling across a canyon so wide that the echo barely existed at all.

Listening to the Sky With Giant Metal Ears

We often picture space exploration as rockets and rovers: metal machines slamming into the sky, plumes of fire trailing behind them. But some of the most profound discoveries come not from leaving Earth, but from staying very still and listening carefully.

The signal in question was picked up by a network of radio telescopes—vast metal dishes that look like they’re waiting patiently for rain from the stars. These instruments are built to be quiet, both in their surroundings and in their internal electronics, so they can notice the softest whispers of the universe.

In reality, the signal wasn’t heard in the traditional sense. No one plugged in headphones and gasped at alien music. Instead, receivers captured the faintest fluctuations in radio intensity, storing them as streams of numbers. Software turned those numbers into plots, and those plots into questions. Was this a glitch? A distant quasar? Emission from a galaxy still in its infancy? Or something no one had seen before?

For days, the team did the unglamorous work: ruling things out. They compared timestamps with satellite logs and flight paths. They scrubbed the data for artifacts caused by Earth-based interference: a stray radar ping, a wandering aircraft, even microwave ovens on nearby bases that had, more than once in history, faked a “cosmic” signal. Nothing matched. The ten-second pattern remained stubbornly, tantalizingly unexplained.

What Makes Ten Seconds So Strange?

Ten seconds doesn’t sound like much, but in radio astronomy, it’s an eternity for certain kinds of events and far too brief for others. Some cosmic signals, like fast radio bursts, pop in and out in less than a blink. Others, like the steady hum from pulsars, can last for years or even millennia, as regular as clockwork.

Whatever produced this ancient signal turned on—then off—in about the time it takes to draw a slow breath. That fleeting window, combined with its incredible age and distance, makes it deeply puzzling.

Some on the team compared its profile to known signatures: brief brightenings when a massive star collapses into a black hole, or when jets of matter blast out from the heart of a forming galaxy. Others wondered if this might be a gravitational lensing event—light and radio waves magnified and warped by invisible matter, stretched through cosmic glass. Every possibility seemed to raise more questions than it answered.

The Temptation of “Is Anyone There?”

Whenever a strange signal comes from space, one question crawls out from the shadows of imagination: could this be someone else trying to speak?

The scientists knew better than to jump to that conclusion. The universe is loud with natural phenomena, and history is littered with “maybe it’s aliens” moments that turned out to be ordinary physics wearing an extraordinary costume. Still, human curiosity is stubborn. In the quiet after a long meeting, someone would inevitably say it, almost joking, almost not: “What if it’s a message?”

Ten seconds is long enough to encode a lot of information. If you modulate a signal—changing its frequency or amplitude in patterns—you can compress entire libraries into tiny fragments of time. But this ancient echo carried no clear modulation, no obvious structure that screamed intention. To the best of our instruments’ current abilities, it looked natural: a flare, a flash, a burst from some cataclysm in the young universe.

And yet, whether or not it was “about” anything, it was still a kind of message: a postcard from a time and place that no longer exists. The star or galaxy—or whatever object released that energy—may have long since changed, merged, or winked out entirely. Only its ten-second shout remains, arriving at our doorstep just now, as if the universe timed its delivery for the moment we finally had ears fine enough to hear it.

What the Signal Really Tells Us

Beneath the speculation, the true power of this event lies in what it can reveal about the early universe itself. Every ancient photon that reaches us is a data point about conditions billions of years ago. Its frequency, intensity, and even the way it has been stretched across time help astrophysicists refine their models of how galaxies grew, how matter clumped, how dark energy pushed everything apart.

The signal may help answer questions such as:

• How quickly did the first galaxies form and ignite?
• What kind of violent events were common in the universe’s childhood?
• How exactly has space expanded between then and now?

In that sense, the signal isn’t just a curiosity—it’s a lens. Through it, scientists can peer more clearly into an era so distant we can’t visit it, only reconstruct it from these faint, long-traveled breadcrumbs.

Time Travel, With Antennae Instead of Engines

When you stand outside at night and look up, you are already time traveling. The light from the Moon is about a little over a second old. Light from the Sun is eight minutes old. The glow from the Andromeda galaxy left its home two and a half million years ago—before humans as we know them walked on Earth.

This ten-second signal is the same idea, stretched to the edge of comprehension. Somewhere, thirteen billion years ago, a cosmic event flared for ten seconds. During that small window, the universe was immeasurably younger. Dinosaurs, continents, civilizations, languages—all the things we count as “history” were not just missing; they were impossibilities. Even our planet did not yet exist as dust in a newborn star’s disk.

And yet, that brief flare carried a promise: that if, someday, a distant civilization evolved the patience and tools to listen, it might learn something about where it came from. Because that’s what this really is. The signal doesn’t just come from “out there”; it comes from our own past. The atoms in your bones and blood were once part of the same universe that flashed that energy outward. The story of that ten-second event is, in some quiet, cosmic way, also the story of you.

Where We Go From Here

In the weeks and months after the detection, the ten seconds were replayed thousands of times—not as sound, but as graphs, simulations, and equations. Other observatories were brought in, digging through their archives, checking the same patch of sky. Could there have been a precursor signal we missed? Was there a faint afterglow lingering somewhere in other wavelengths—infrared, X-ray, visible light?

Answers don’t arrive as quickly as signals do. They take patience, cross-checking, and the slow weaving of competing theories. Eventually, the event may find its place on a chart or inside a paper: a remarkable early-universe transient with certain properties, given a tidy catalog name that sounds more like a password than a discovery.

But for the people who sat awake with it, watching those numbers ripple across their screens for the first time, it will remain something more intimate: a reminder that the universe is not a static backdrop, but a living history still unfolding, still telling its story—ten seconds at a time, across billions of years.

FAQ

Did NASA really “hear” a sound from 13 billion years ago?

No one heard an actual sound. Space is nearly a vacuum, so sound waves cannot travel the way they do in air. What NASA detected was a faint radio signal—electromagnetic radiation—that had been traveling through space for about 13 billion years. Scientists can convert such signals into audio for analysis or illustration, but the original data is light, not sound.

Could this 10-second signal be from aliens?

Current evidence suggests the signal is natural in origin, likely from a powerful cosmic event in the early universe, such as activity around young galaxies or massive stars. While it’s tempting to wonder about extraterrestrial intelligence, scientists first exhaust all natural explanations, which are already numerous and fascinating.

How do scientists know the signal is 13 billion years old?

They estimate the signal’s age by analyzing its wavelength and how much it has been “redshifted”—stretched to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. This redshift can be translated into distance and look-back time, telling us roughly how long the signal has been traveling before reaching Earth.

What can a 10-second signal actually teach us?

Even a brief event can carry detailed information about the conditions in the early universe. Its strength, frequency range, and the way it has been stretched by cosmic expansion help scientists refine models of how quickly galaxies formed, how matter and energy behaved, and how the universe evolved in its infancy.

Will we ever detect another signal like this?

It’s possible, and that’s part of why astronomers continually monitor the sky. As instruments grow more sensitive and surveys cover larger portions of the sky for longer periods, the chances of finding similar ancient signals increase. Each new detection becomes another piece of the puzzle, helping to build a richer picture of the universe’s earliest chapters.