Nine star-like objects that appeared and vanished within 30 minutes has an international team of astronomers excited as it continues to investigate the curious occurrence in the hope of finding sources of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).
The international collaboration of astronomers from Sweden, Spain, the US, Ukraine, and India, including Alok C Gupta, from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, investigated an early form of photography that used glass plates to capture images of the night sky from April 12, 1950, exposed at Palomar Observatory in California and detected these transient stars which were not to be found in photographs half an hour later and not traced since then.
The astronomers track vanishing and appearing celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with new modern one, register unnatural phenomena, and probe deep into such phenomena to record changes in the Universe.
Such a group of objects appearing and disappearing at the same time have been detected for the first time in the history of astronomy. Gupta told TOI: “There has been no evidence for anything like this ever before and it has naturally piqued our interest.”
The findings have been published in Nature, and there’s no explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lensing, fast radio bursts, or any variable star that could be responsible for this cluster of fast changes in the sky, which Gupta said is what makes the discovery more interesting.
He sid that the only thing they can say with certainty is that these images contain star-like objects that should not be there. In fact, the astronomers who belong to the collaboration Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) are now eager to look for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitized data from the 1950s in a hope to find ETI.
The study was led by Beatriz Villarroel of Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, Stockholm, Sweden, and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and used the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias — the largest optical telescope around the world — at Canary Islands, Spain, to do deep second epoch observations.
As they continue to explore reasons behind the observation of these strange transient objects, the astronomers are examining the possibility that the photographic plates were contaminated with radioactive particles causing false stars on the plates.
“But if the observation is proven to be real, another option is solar reflections from reflective, unnatural objects in orbit around Earth several years before the first human satellite was launched,” a statement read, adding that the astronomers will also be looking for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitized data from the 1950s in a hope to find ETI.
TOI first reported about the VASCO group in February 2020 when it had proposed that “those parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for ETI.” The team had then “proposed to search surveys for vanished stars in our Galaxy as probes of ‘impossible effects’ that could only be ascribed to an extraterrestrial technology.”
The international collaboration of astronomers from Sweden, Spain, the US, Ukraine, and India, including Alok C Gupta, from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, investigated an early form of photography that used glass plates to capture images of the night sky from April 12, 1950, exposed at Palomar Observatory in California and detected these transient stars which were not to be found in photographs half an hour later and not traced since then.
The astronomers track vanishing and appearing celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with new modern one, register unnatural phenomena, and probe deep into such phenomena to record changes in the Universe.
Such a group of objects appearing and disappearing at the same time have been detected for the first time in the history of astronomy. Gupta told TOI: “There has been no evidence for anything like this ever before and it has naturally piqued our interest.”
The findings have been published in Nature, and there’s no explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lensing, fast radio bursts, or any variable star that could be responsible for this cluster of fast changes in the sky, which Gupta said is what makes the discovery more interesting.
He sid that the only thing they can say with certainty is that these images contain star-like objects that should not be there. In fact, the astronomers who belong to the collaboration Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) are now eager to look for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitized data from the 1950s in a hope to find ETI.
The study was led by Beatriz Villarroel of Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, Stockholm, Sweden, and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and used the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias — the largest optical telescope around the world — at Canary Islands, Spain, to do deep second epoch observations.
As they continue to explore reasons behind the observation of these strange transient objects, the astronomers are examining the possibility that the photographic plates were contaminated with radioactive particles causing false stars on the plates.
“But if the observation is proven to be real, another option is solar reflections from reflective, unnatural objects in orbit around Earth several years before the first human satellite was launched,” a statement read, adding that the astronomers will also be looking for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitized data from the 1950s in a hope to find ETI.
TOI first reported about the VASCO group in February 2020 when it had proposed that “those parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for ETI.” The team had then “proposed to search surveys for vanished stars in our Galaxy as probes of ‘impossible effects’ that could only be ascribed to an extraterrestrial technology.”