What is metastable range?

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Wikipedia states that

In 1953 George W. Whitehead showed that there is a metastable range for the homotopy groups of spheres.

What is the metastable range? I was unable to find the definition.

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The metastable range refers to the existence of a long exact sequence $$\pi_{3n-2}(S^{n}) \rightarrow \cdots \rightarrow \pi_{q}(S^{n}) \rightarrow \pi_{q+1}(S^{n+1}) \rightarrow \pi_{q-1}(S^{2n-1}) \rightarrow \pi_{q-1}(S^{n}) \rightarrow \cdots$$ in the range $q \leq 3n-2$.

The relevant paper is here.