And this has now given us one of the keys that help us unlock the mystery of what fast radio bursts are - a census of the galaxies that spat them out across the Universe.

"Just like doing video calls with colleagues shows you their homes and gives you a bit of an insight into their lives, looking into the host galaxies of fast radio bursts gives us insights to their origins," explained astrophysicist Shivani Bhandari of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

Most of them are one-off signals, but a small number have repeated, which has allowed scientists to trace them back to a source galaxy; to date, two repeating fast radio bursts have been localised this way.

The first analysis of the galaxies that produce one-off bursts paints a very different picture.

Using a special detector in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder array, Bhandari and her team localised four one-off fast radio bursts - FRB 180924, FRB 181112, FRB 190102 and FRB 190608 - with much greater precision.

"These precisely localised fast radio bursts came from the outskirts of their home galaxies, removing the possibility that they have anything to do with supermassive black holes," Bhandari said.

They're relatively large and forming stars at a pretty modest rate, in contrast to the two galaxies that appear to be the source of the repeating fast radio bursts.