The frequency of fast radio bursts is among the rare and recent mysteries in the universe, and it seems that newly discovered frequent bursts have deepened this mystery due to their mysterious origin.

Astronomers recently spotted a repeating FRB called FRB 20200120E, which the team believes may have originated from a unique or unusual cosmic object.

Scientists have detected hundreds of fast radio bursts in the sky over the past 15 years, with the vast majority of them detected only once.

But it was observed that a small percentage of the explosions were repeated, allowing astronomers to trace more than 20 frequent fast radio bursts back to their origins.

Among the most recent of these discoveries was FRB 20200120E, which scientists have followed to a globular cluster of ancient stars in the Bodhi galaxy (Messier 81) and the famous constellation Ursa Major, also known as the Daughters of the Great Coffin.

Astronomers have traced the location of the blasts to a galaxy 11.7 million light-years away, making them the closest known extragalactic fast radio bursts, but they also appear in a globular cluster — a group of very old stars, not the kind of place, at all, that scientists might expect to find a species. A star that fires fast radio bursts.

His discovery points to a different formation mechanism for these stars, suggesting that FRBs can arise from a wider range of environments than we thought.

The discovery came as a surprise to astronomers, because so far FRBs have been associated with magnetars, a type of highly magnetized neutron star not thought to exist among older star groups.

“If FRB 20200120E is an active magnetar, it must have formed by means we haven’t seen yet,” Caltech astronomy professor Vikram Ravi, who was not involved in the research, said in a commentary published in the latest issue of Nature.

The international team of astronomers led by Franz Kirsten of Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, details the FRB 20200120E study in the journal Nature.

The paper suggests that if the source of the FRB was something other than a conventional magnetar, it might be something unique or unusual.

“We instead propose that FRB 20200120E arise from a highly magnetized neutron star that is either through the accretion-induced collapse of a white dwarf, or the merger of compressed stars into a binary system,” the paper’s abstract states.

In simpler terms, an ancient white dwarf star might have sucked up huge amounts of gas from a companion star or even swallowed a companion whole before collapsing into a magnetar.

Understanding this mystery will require further observations, but the bottom line is that tracing the fast radio burst to such an unexpected source indicates that there is still much to learn about this phenomenon, and may upend our understanding of other aspects of the universe in general.