Coming up, the bursts of energy from space that had scientists shaking their heads in disbelief.

When I first heard about the phenomenon, I was pretty skeptical that there weren't just some radio communication.

And treating the sick patient that is the PhD system.

It's one thing to treat somebody for a single acute lesion,

but to treat somebody for a variety of chronic diseases at one time, it's hard.

Plus, tracking down the universe's huge amount of missing matter.

This is the Nature podcast for December 3, 2015.

I'm Adam Levy.

And I'm Charmany Bundell.

Eight years ago, astronomers scouring through their data saw a very strange signal,

one that they're only now beginning to understand. Nature reporter Lizzie Gibney investigates.

In 2007, the Parks Observatory in Australia discovered a single, very bright flash of radio waves in their data.

These lit up the telescope but were gone in the blink of an eye.

For a long time, researchers figured this burst of radio waves was just a blip, a signal caused

by a faulty instrument or by something boringly close to home, like a satellite.

By 2013, a few more similar bursts had trickled in, but all from the same telescope.

When I first heard about the phenomena, I was pretty skeptical that there weren't just some radio communication.

That's Kiyoshi Masui, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia.

His skepticism was justified because sometimes exciting signals do turn out to have mundane explanations.

Once, researchers at the Park's Observatory traced the source of some other radio bursts

to the opening of their kitchen microwave. When last year a second telescope reported seeing the

flashes, known as fast radio bursts, any remaining skepticism quickly fell away. Researchers including

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