And just like that it was never seen again. People started calling it the “Lorimer burst.” Other astronomers began publishing papers about what it could be: a primordial black hole? The cusp of a cosmic string? An unknown reaction from a supernova explosion? Two neutron stars crashing into each other? These are the X-Games of astronomy.

But time continued passing, as it is wont to do. And scientists started to doubt, as they are wont to do, when no one but Lorimer could find a Lorimer burst. “All we had were a few milliseconds data from the late 1990s,” McLaughlin previously told me.

Then, in 2011, a group led by Sarah Burke-Spolaor, then a postdoctoral researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, offered a stunning alternative theory: The exotic flashes might come from right here on Earth. The team had found 16 Lorimer-like pulses, but showed they were just blasts from Earth’s atmosphere—merely mimicking faraway signals. Perytons, Burke-Spolaor called them. (The name comes from a Jorge Louis Borges story, referring to a (fictional) stag-bird hybrid—half Earth-bound, half not.) After that, many people “stopped wondering about” the Lorimer burst. At one conference talk, a heckling audience member even asked attendees to please raise their hands if they “believed the Lorimer burst.”

But three years later, in 2014, the same scientist who’d derided the burst as a peryton declared that now she, too, had seen a milliseconds-long BLIP!!!. And it wasn’t a stag-bird.

That summer, another team found four more. “They had found one at a time for a long time,” says Petroff. But when they found four in the same set of data (and one from a telescope other than Parkes), naysayers couldn’t hand-wave them away. Now, everybody believed Duncan’s bursts, which they had renamed the more professional “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs for short.

Around the same time that her colleagues began drafting the four-burst paper, Petroff began graduate school at Swinburne University. “It became my job to look for more of these FRBs,” she says.

* * *

We still don’t know what in space acts that fast—partly because we only recently have the ability to see the sky change that fast. No one knew the Moon had craters until Galileo pointed his fancy new telescope—with high spatial resolution—at it. No one knew FRBs slashed through space until we pointed our even newer, fancier telescopes at them. Just as Galileo couldn’t guess why the moon has craters until he knew the craters existed, modern scientists couldn’t figure out why FRBs happen until they knew FRBs happened. “Any time you open up new parameter space, you find something unexpected,” says Petroff. “I’m willing to believe FRBs come from something we haven’t thought of before.”