The repeating bursts appeared last summer almost as soon as the team turned on and began tuning up a new telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, in British Columbia. The team announced the discovery in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting on Jan. 9th in Seattle.

The astronomers estimated that the new repeater is about 1.5 billion light-years away, roughly half the distance to the other repeater. The existence of a second repeater suggests that there are many more to be found.

So far, scientists have detected about 60 single fast radio bursts and two that repeat. They believe there could be as many as a thousand FRBs in the sky every day.

There are a number of theories about what could be causing them.

They include a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field that is spinning very rapidly, two neutron stars merging together, and, among a minority of observers, some form of alien spaceship.