Blitzars, which last only about a millisecond, have been detected by telescopes since about 2001 and have been heard ten times since. And nobody really knows where they come from, or why they happen.
But a new study has found that the bursts line up in a way that is not explained by existing physics, reports the New Scientist.
Scientists tried to work out how far the bursts have travelled through space to get to us, using “dispersion measures”. That looks at how the radiowaves that are being sent get scattered as they travel through space — the higher the dispersion measure, the further that radiowaves seem to have been sent before they arrived.
All of the ten bursts that have been detected so far have dispersion measures that line up as multiples of a single number: 187.5. The chances of them doing so are 5 in 10,000, the scientists behind the study claim.
This could be the real deal. But is there a "message" encoded in these bursts? To read more, click here.