The signal was quick. The spurt of radio activity, originating from a source other than our galaxy, lasted fewer than 5 milliseconds.

And it was furious. To generate such a burst would require 500 million times the power of our solar system's sun. The unknown source of the signal prompted intense speculation.

One proposal, to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may be the wildest yet: Sailing aliens.

"An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking," said Avi Loeb, a theorist and author of the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement on Thursday.

A decade ago, Lorimer and his mentor, Matthew Bailes, described the phenomenon as a fast radio burst, or FRB. "Duncan Lorimer and I were just completely gobsmacked," said Bailes, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, to The Washington Post. "The day we discovered the first FRB we couldn't sleep." Astrophysicists have detected only 25 other FRBs since Bailes and four other astronomers published their groundbreaking report in 2007, he said.