An international study, led by an Irish scientist, has identified for the first time the location of a so-called fast radio burst, and the galaxy it is coming from.
FRBs are strange bright flashes of radio waves lasting very short periods which come from somewhere in deep space.
While their existence has been known for some time, difficulties in detecting them have meant that researchers have until now never managed to identify their origin.
Theories suggest they are generated in far away galaxies, but nobody had ever been able to find strong evidence to prove how they are made.
However this research, published in the journal Nature, presents new evidence about where they come from.
The international team, led by Irishman Dr Evan Keane at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, used the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to detect a FRB on 18 April last year - only the seventeenth ever to be picked up.
Because of the difficulties involved in detecting the phenomenon, the researchers had built their own observing system at Swinburne which could pick up FRBs in seconds.
An alert system then led other telescopes around the world to look for it too.
The team then used the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru optical telescope in Hawaii to identify an elliptical galaxy some six billion light years away as the source of the FRB.
This also enabled them to figure out the redshift - the speed at which the galaxy is moving away from us due to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
Redshift has until now proven difficult to assess because FRBs only usually last milliseconds.
Because they picked it up early, and it took six days for the signal to disappear, the physicists were able to establish the redshift and use it to figure out how far away the FRB originated.
The scientists do not think it likely that the FRB came from a pulsar - a rotating neutron star that emits electromagnetic radiation - because the afterglow lasted for so long.
The research is important because it confirms the current cosmological model of the distribution of matter in the universe.
The team used a measure of the delay in the radio signal which is influenced by how much material it has gone through, and the distance to assess the current model of how matter is distributed throughout the universe.
This is important in order to establish where all the ordinary matter in the universe is, as scientists have so far only been able to detect half of it.
"The good news is our observations and the model match, we have found the missing matter" explained Dr Keane.
"It's the first time a fast radio burst has been used to conduct a cosmological measurement."
It is hoped that in the future the Square Kilometre Array - a massive radio telescope in the planning - will be able to detect hundreds of FRBs, enabling much more precise measurements of matter in the Universe
Australian telescope finds hundreds of galaxies
Meanwhile, an Australian telescope used to broadcast live video of man's first steps on the moon in 1969 has found hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way by using an innovative receiver that measures radio waves.
Scientists at the Parkes telescope, 355 km west of Sydney, said they had detected 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before.
The findings were reported in the latest issue of Astronomical Journal under the title 'The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey'.
"Hundreds of new galaxies were discovered, using the same telescope that was used to broadcast the TV pictures from Apollo11," said Lister Staveley-Smith, a professor at the University of Western Australia's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.
"The electronic technology at the back end is substantially different and that is why we can still keep using these old telescopes," he said.
The discoveries occurred as the scientists were investigating the region's close proximity to the Great Attractor, a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space.
The Great Attractor appears to be drawing the Milky Way towards it with a gravitational force equivalent more than two million km per hour.
Using radio waves has allowed scientists to see beyond dust and stars in the Milky Way that had previously blocked the view of telescopes, the study showed.
Staveley-Smith, the lead author on the Astronomical Journal, said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s.
"It's a missing part of the jigsaw puzzle, which is the structure of our local universe," said Michael Burton, a professor at the University of New South Wales' Physics School.
"They have managed to pierce through it and complete the picture of what our part of the universe looks like."
Staveley-Smith, the lead author on the Astronomical Journal, said scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious Great Attractor since major deviations from universal expansion were first discovered in the 1970s and 1980s.
"It's a missing part of the jigsaw puzzle, which is the structure of our local universe," said Michael Burton, a professor at the University of New South Wales' Physics School.
"They have managed to pierce through it and complete the picture of what our part of the universe looks like."
