It came from outer space.

For the first time, the origin of a single radio pulse has been pinpointed to a distant galaxy several billion light years away, a new study said.

The cause of the bursts remains unknown but the ability to determine their exact location is a big leap towards solving this mystery, the study said.

The "fast radio burst" – a very short-lived pulse of radio waves that comes from across the universe – has been identified as originating from a Milky-Way-sized galaxy some 3.6 billion light-years away.

"This is the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts in 2007," said study lead author Keith Bannister of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

"If we were to stand on the moon and look down at the Earth with this precision, we would be able to tell not only which city the burst came from, but which postcode and even which city block,” he said.

Fast radio bursts last less than a millisecond, making it difficult to accurately determine where they have come from.

Since 2007, just 85 cosmic radio wave bursts have been detected, according to the Independent. Most are “one-offs” but a small amount are “repeaters” which recur in the same place. In this case, the fast radio burst, known officially as FRB 180924, was a single burst, unlike others that can flash multiple times over an extended period.

Upon reaching Earth, these pulses are mere electromagnetic whispers that require sensitive radio telescopes to detect. The discovery was made with a new radio telescope in Western Australia and later confirmed using other telescopes in Chile and Hawaii.

“These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space,” said Jean-Pierre Macquart, study co-author from Curtin University in Australia. “Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space,” he said.

As for what the bursts are, ideas range from a rotating neutron star to, yes, a high-powered signal from an advanced civilization.

"We cannot rule out completely the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the fast radio bursts in general," Vishal Gajjar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley, said last year.

Thursday's study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.