Scientists have discovered several unexplained flashes emanating from an explosion in space nicknamed the "Tasmanian devil."

The research team behind a new paper published Wednesday in Nature said the flashes in the luminous fast blue optical transient, or LFBOT, are just as powerful as the initial explosion, which has not previously been observed.

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“No one really knew what to say,” Anna Y. Q. Ho, one of the authors of the paper and an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, said in a statement. “We had never seen anything like that before — something so fast, and the brightness as strong as the original explosion months later — in any supernova or FBOT. We’d never seen that, period, in astronomy.”

There were 14 irregular flashes during a 120-day period from the "Tasmanian devil," known as AT2022tsd, but researchers believe the number of flashes was likely more than they observed. Ho said the consistency of how bright the brief flashes were is peculiar.

“Amazingly, instead of fading steadily as one would expect, the source briefly brightened again — and again, and again,” Ho said. “LFBOTs are already a kind of weird, exotic event, so this was even weirder.”

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Ho said she believes the insights from their research can further the understanding of a star's life cycle, including what happens after a star dies. She said the flashes could be coming from a newly formed corpse from the remnants of the explosion.

“Because the corpse is not just sitting there, it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” Ho said. “We think these flares could be coming from one of these newly formed corpses, which gives us a way to study their properties when they’ve just been formed.”