A radio flash, one of many which have baffled scientists for nine years, has been traced to a galaxy six billion light-years from Earth.
Fast radio burst (FRBs) are invisible to the human eye and last just a fraction of a second, emitting as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun does in about 10,000 years.
It is not known what causes them - only 17 have been detected since 2007, even though more than 10,000 are thought to occur every day - and for years astronomers have been unable to discover where they come from.
But now a team has for the first time traced one flash to the faraway galaxy in the constellation Canis Major.
Some had speculated if the flashes might be signals from aliens but this has been ruled out by study lead author Evan Keane of the Square Kilometre Array Organisation.
More likely is the possibility that the FRB, seen on 18 April last year, was the result of two ultra-dense neutron stars colliding.
The burst was picked up by the Parkes radio telescope in the east of Australia, triggering an alert for other telescopes around the world to follow up.
In the hours after the flash, an "afterglow" lasting about six days was detected.
It was picked up by a Japanese telescope in Hawaii, which was able to detect its origin.
Mr Keane said this involved zooming in by 1,000 times more than what could be done with just one telescope.
The origin was traced to the galaxy - elliptical rather than spiral - about 70,000 light-years wide and with a mass of about 100 billion Sun-sized stars.
"Our discovery opens the way to working out what makes these bursts," said Simon Johnston of Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, which was involved in the project.
The research was published in the science journal Nature.
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