Kovi Rose, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney, led an international team that discovered what researchers are calling a “Rosetta stone” for these mysterious signals. Just as the original Rosetta Stone unlocked the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, this newly identified star system may finally give astronomers a key for interpreting one of the stranger unsolved problems in modern astronomy.

“For the first time we have pinpointed the origin of these signals, confirming the source to be a ‘cataclysmic variable’, or an accreting white dwarf star,” Rose said in a statement.