Because of math? This survey is for nearby stars. The star in question is, in fact, only 1500 light years away. The chances we'd observe a rare phenomenon in a

Because of math? This survey is for nearby stars. The star in question is, in fact, only 1500 light years away. The chances we'd observe a rare phenomenon in a small subset of stars (the article says the survey was for ~150K stars) is, according to the authors of the paper, exceedingly rare. Given the author of the paper is doing a proposal to point a radio telescope at the star says to me that chances are decent enough to justify further investigation.