Space is the final frontier according to James T Kirk.

We’ve been turning our eyes skywards for millennia and gazing up, wondering if anyone is out there.

Whether it be the first telescope to the recent eclipse, humankind has always had a yearning to know what’s going on in the heavens.

From shooting stars to Orion’s belt I remember as a nipper my dad seemed to know all about what was going on above.

These days the only constellation I can ever remember is the Plough – which is also singularly uninspiring.

But there are those who have more than a passing interest in all things spacey – and I don’t mean fans of American actor Kevin.

I imagine to become a scientist working on space things (very technical I know) must take lots of hard work and no little intelligence.

It’s rare you see one on the telly or quoted in the paper without Dr before his or her name which means they must have put in the effort.

These are logical, determined people who can understand complex ideas at the drop of a hat.

Which is why the tale I’m about to regale you with now is all the more remarkable.

Come with me, if you will, Down Under to the town of Parkes.

It’s about a five-hour drive inland from Sydney and is home to Parkes Observatory.

The observatory contains a huge radio telescope that’s 64m in diameter. As if that weren’t thrilling enough, there’s more to this story.

Rather than using a beady eye to peer into a tube to look at our solar system, this radio telescope picks up signals and tries to figure out where they have come from and what on earth (and also in space) they mean.

For the past few years a team at the observatory have been trying to figure out about a phenomena called perytons.

These perytons were strange signals seeming created near our planet but we had no idea how they were made.

Years were invested into finding out what these signals were – and trying to unlock the puzzle of what was creating them.

My money was on a distance race of space kangaroos beaming out a message for Russell Crowe, but it appears I was wrong.

As it turns out, after thousands of man (and woman) hours by a group of very smart people it was the microwave that the team cooked their meals in.

No, really.

Apparently a monitoring device would spike at regular intervals and eventually one of the team realised that the spike was due to Bill or some other member of staff taking his now piping hot soup out of the microwave by pressing open the door before it had finished cooking.

So that was the mystery of the peryton solved. Sort of.

The lead scientist revealed the news recently with a caveat that if you’re a fellow boffin who is peryton hunting you may want to make sure no-one is heating up a left-over Chinese takeaway anywhere in the vicinity.

However, scientists believe that not all perytons are as a result of lunch so the search continues.

I must go now – I’m off to open the fridge and create a black hole.