A University of Pretoria-led team detected the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever observed, a rare natural radio phenomenon produced by colliding galaxies, using the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa’s Karoo desert.
A research team led by the University of Pretoria has detected the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever observed, a powerful natural radio emission sometimes described as a “space laser,” using the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa.
The signal traveled more than 8 billion light-years to reach Earth, breaking the previous distance record of roughly 3.5 billion light-years and giving astronomers a new way to study how galaxies formed and evolved when the universe was less than half its current age.
The finding was accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, with a preprint posted to arXiv in February 2026.
Hydroxyl megamasers form during violent mergers between gas-rich galaxies. The collision compresses enormous clouds of hydroxyl molecules, which then amplify passing radio waves through the same basic physical principle as a laser, producing an intense signal detectable across billions of light-years.
The term “megamaser” reflects the extreme brightness of the emission compared to ordinary masers. In this case, the newly discovered source is so luminous that the team has proposed calling it a “gigamaser,” a step above megamaser and a category with only a handful of known examples.
The source is catalogued as HATLAS J142935.3-002836, a merging galaxy system at a redshift of z=1.027. That means the emission was produced when the universe was roughly 6 billion years old.
The signal was strong enough to detect in part due to a stroke of cosmic alignment. An unrelated galaxy between the merger and Earth acted as a gravitational lens, bending space-time and magnifying the gigamaser’s radio waves before they reached MeerKAT’s dishes.
“This system is truly extraordinary,” lead author Dr. Thato Manamela, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, said in a statement released by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. “We are seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Not only that, during its journey to Earth, the radio waves are further amplified by a perfectly aligned, yet unrelated foreground galaxy. This galaxy acts as a lens, the way a water droplet on a windowpane would, because its mass curves the local space-time.”
How MeerKAT found it
MeerKAT is an array of 64 linked radio dishes and a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array, a much larger international telescope facility under construction in South Africa and Australia.
MeerKAT is designed to detect faint radio emission at centimeter wavelengths, but the discovery also depended on intensive computation. Researchers processed terabytes of data through specialized pipelines before the signal could be isolated and confirmed.
Why megamasers matter
Hydroxyl megamasers are rare and typically appear only in the most extreme galaxy mergers, the same events that can trigger intense star formation and feed supermassive black holes at galactic centers. Because of that, they can serve as markers for identifying violent collisions in the early universe that might otherwise be too faint to detect directly.
The team says the goal now is to find many more. Manamela said the group is building the computational infrastructure needed for systematic surveys that could identify hundreds or thousands of similar systems ahead of the full Square Kilometre Array coming online.
Co-author Prof. Roger Deane, Director of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and a professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, said in a statement that the result shows what becomes possible when advanced telescope hardware is paired with the right computational support. The discovery, he said, underscores South Africa’s growing role in data-intensive radio astronomy.
Source: Manamela et al., “MeerKAT discovery of a high-redshift strongly-lensed hydroxyl gigamaser,” arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.13396. Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
Quotes in this article are drawn from a press release issued by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) on February 19, 2026.
Ray Jackson holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Manitoba and a PhD in Physics from Carleton University. His reporting interests include Current and Future Technologies, Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.