In 2012, a giant star some 25,000 light-years away blinked at the Earth, and we stared back, a little confused.

The team has a hunch that a large object, orbiting the giant star, obscured our view of it briefly -- but the nature of the occulting object is uncertain.

"It's amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star and we can only speculate what its origin is," said Sergey Koposov, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the new study.

"There are certainly more to be found, but the challenge now is in figuring out what the hidden companions are, and how they came to be surrounded by discs, despite orbiting so far from the giant star," said Leigh Smith, an astronomer at Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy and first author of the study