What are those things?
For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.
A new study shows that the so-called "fast radio bursts" follow a weirdly specific pattern -- a finding that the researchers behind the study say "is very hard to explain."
"There is something really interesting we need to understand," study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. "This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T."