Just what’s causing the bursts isn’t certain. The scientsists know that it’s coming from a “star-churning” area on the outskirts of a giant spiral galaxy, but not what it is. Neutron stars are believed to be a frequent source, but there are a number of possible explanations. They may be coming from a single star that’s both spinning and wobbling, a binary system with an eccentric orbit or a gas-emitting source whose output is magnified by a host star. Although magnetars are increasingly believed to be the cause of these bursts, there’s no guarantee one is involved here.

More study will be necessary to get better answers. Even so, this suggests that fast radio bursts are more complex than initially thought, and that there’s plenty of unusual behavior in the universe.

The discovery could shed much more light on the nature of the bursts. This burst’s proximity to Earth made it possible to detect bursts in other wavelengths, like X-rays, that weren’t practical with more distant examples. It might be possible to determine the cause, whether it’s the product of the magnetic fields themselves or something inside the star.

Don’t expect this to solve every riddle around fast radio bursts. It’s still not certain why some bursts are more energetic than others (the nearby instance was about 1,000 times weaker than usual), and others erupt in patterns that don’t necessarily line up with what you’d get from a magnetar. Nonetheless, this ‘local’ event might answer many questions about the bursts and what they say about the universe, such as the distribution of matter.