Slightly off topic, but ties into this conversation. My Aunt was a radiologist in Salt Lake in 1950’s and 1960’s. She knew every time there was a secret underground nuclear test because they would get weird spots and hazing on the X-ray negatives. They would send the film back to Kodak for reimbursement, and I learned not to long ago that Kodak was reimbursed by the Federal Government. When my Aunt was telling this, my Grandmother ( who was a cook at the Mt Hale observatory), said that she remembered mentioning how the researchers said that the nuke guys screwed up their photographic plates. One of those small world things!
Neat! But to make the world seem even smaller, Kodak had their own nuclear reactor right here in Rochester, New York. It was in a building with a public auditorium.
As I understand that there were no Atomic explosions the year of the plate was exposed. And Kodak started shipping the plates protected with lead after Kodak found out about the radiation. This still would not precluded contamination, just makes it harder to explain.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Einstein
You do not know what clickbait is. Many or most of his thumbnails are classic clickbait. Most clickbait is not a lie, but deceptive in intent. Cover: "Are these the footprints of aliens?" Story: "No." There is no lie but there is an attempt to get you to click something most people would not click if they knew the content. A sighted beggar choices to sit on the corner with dark glasses and a white cane but if you asked him explicitly he would admit he is not blind. That is better than saying ge us blind but it would be ridiculous to leave comments praising his unique honesty.
Many angles have been mentioned above. One thing, that springs to mind, is that the left plate is marked "Red" (upper right corner) and the other "Blue". If this somehow refers to different spectral ranges, then an explanation could be that the "triple Star" rather were some other objects much closer to us. Objects, that were much more visible in the red spectrum than in the blue. Another thing that is worth observing, is if other objects are now visibel in the area,where the triblet is now missing - indicating that the triblet is really gone. This could indicate if radioactive particles were the culprits. Then again, comparing to earlier recordings, this should be simple to rule out. Now, I've got no education in this field, så this is just what springs to mind.
@@rustinpeace770 I am familiar with the dobbler effect - blue and red shifts. I was referring to detector selection/filtering, which, despite use of the labels "blue"/"red", is something different.
I want to take a moment, and thank Anton for all his hard work, putting together an informative RU-vid channel. his no nonsense approach to getting to to the point, and peering into the mysteries of our universe is enlightening. Please keep on doing what you’re doing.
@@StridersBored such as "is there any other model or any other observer who has an alternative explanation for this phenomenon?" " Have any other theories been tested and observed? Has anyone else made any predictions about this over the past 10 years? Has anyone else made consistent predictions not just with astrophysics such as this but also with interplanetary space that could explain this. With other planets. With our planet specificly in regard to using space weather to help predict earthquakes? How often are the predictions correct? More often than chance would allow? More than 70%? More than. 80+% correct? How often would someone have to make accurate predictions days weeks months and years out to pay attention to what they're saying, If for no other reason than just to prove them wrong so a whole community of hundreds of thousands of people don't get conned. If someone were consistently making predictions, explaining the logic of how and why they came to the predictions, while openly challenging anyone to disprove the logic of the argument to explain why the predication came true (despite giving citations to the published literature every single day so you can check it yourselves) but allowing soace for the challenger tonexplain how /why he was wrong about it even though theit predictions come true again and again. Yet no one has taken up this challenge... I'd probably not continue to ignore that person. But when the ipcc funds my research and wont acknowledge them because their model goes against the model the "authorities" are trying to push to the general public to impose a tax that would generate a new stream of revenue.
Maybe I missed something. Have any of these stars been observed by two different telescopes or at two different times? That would eliminate contamination. What about rogue planets or dark stars passing in front of them? And do stars appear as well as disappear?
it's taking photos night after night from same point , it's used to determine if there are moving objects . Easy these days with tracking telescope. Depending of the distances of those stars , you can have interstellar clouds that blocks our view If those stars are 10 000 light years away, it happened long time ago, astronomical time scales are too long for one generation to observe. We need to build giant telescopes on dark side of the moon, that wont totally hinder light pollution from earth, but would be a good start. Canary island has biggest one piece mirror telescope, 10, 5 m/34ft main mirror , we need bigger on moon build from segments like JWST , thats only 6, 5m/21ft
@@pete_lind. You may have been thinking of the telescope we need on the far side of the moon is Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT). The LCRT would use a 1-kilometer diameter wire mesh to form a parabolic reflector inside a lunar crater. The mesh would be deployed by robots and anchored to the crater wall. The LCRT would be able to observe radio waves at wavelengths from 10 meters to 50 meters. This wavelength range is particularly interesting to astronomers because it contains signals from the early universe, before the first stars and galaxies formed. These frequencies can not be studied from the earth or near earth due to interference. There is a lot to learn.
My thought exactly. The difference between seen exactly once and more than once would make a *huge* difference. I kinda wonder if these types of events are also showing up in data from All Sky Survey projects? A little math says that, assuming these events are not local but "out there" (and by implication, random) there should be on the order of 1 disappearance a month.
Reminds me of a scifi book I read some time ago. Called Pandora's Star, it was about a vanished star witnessed directly by an astronomer. Turns out the vanished star was still there, but hidden behind a force field barrier. It was a prison to confine a dangerous alien race rather than kill them, but humans interfere with predictable results. 🌏
Great Minds Think Alike! As soon as I saw Anton's video Dyson Alpha and Dyson Beta sprang straight into my mind! Let's hope Morning Light Mountain isn't out there!
If you've only read Pandora's Star, you've got some more reading to do. The whole 3 book series is brilliant, the second series of books that got tacked on afterwards I couldn't get into.
Kodak really did have a problem securing photographic material that wasn't affected by radioactive testing. Fact they were able to discover some radioactive testing that wasn't divulged by the US government because they found some trees produced poor plates because they were too close to radioactive tests
Maybe the objects were very red shifted. The images that show the object were taken through a red filter (as seen in the image notation). The ones without were exposures taken through a blue filter (also seen in the image notation). Its possible they were very visible in IR light and without the specifications of the filters the image train we do not know if the would show up in the other image. For example if a narrow band filter was used to take one set of exposures and other images were taken to be added for an color image composite it is possible to see where an object that was high in IR content maybe captured and not show up in the blue set of images used to create that composite.
This may already have been commented on, but I notice that for the 'triple transient' the earlier (by 56 minutes) of the two plates is in the red band, and the other is in the blue (a common technique that allows an approximate colour/temperature measurement). _If_ the triple object were extremely red, the difference between these two specific plates might be explained (though the nature of the object would not). If later, and modern, images of the same location reveal no object, we are left with a very red phenomenon that had vanished entirely by the time of the next oldest image. I wonder if there are useful images of the location from _before_ 1952?
In the "three vanishing stars" image is something more off than just three vanishing stars. Some smaller stars seem to have changed places or also vanished
That's pretty normal in astroimmaging, the smaller specks etc are sometimes noise induced (hence shifting paces) or they are actual objects but just disappear because the next image had shorter exposure, etc. But its the main 3 bright stars that matter, that kind of formation of bright stuff is too unlikely to vanish.
we clearly are in a simulation and in the 50's they felt they didn't need to provide as much processing power for what was outside our own planet. but it was patched at some point, clearly =p.
Love these mysteries. Even more I love the way they're presented here, sensibly, thoughtfully and with some reverence for the original research. Thank you Anton always remarkable.
The idea of stars vanishing in distant space and us not noticing for a long time reminds me of playing the game outer wilds. And the terror of realizing after many hours playing that the stars in the background were dying constantly with increasing frequency. Then looking at the local star. Truly a "The end is inevitable" kind of moment.
@@sport2175 Dude, game came out in like 2019. If you were planning on playing it maybe you should have done so already if you care about spoilers. Better yet you could have just stopped reading when you read the words "outer wilds". Did it to yourself.
Somebody else in the comments pointed out the "Red" and "Blue" words in the top right corners of both 1952 photos, suggesting these were different filters being used. Since other stars also seem to change in brightness between the 2 photos 1 hour apart, this seems likely. But why haven't any astronomers noticed this?!? Too obvious?!? C'mon!
"The APM POSS1 Northern Sky catalogue contains measurements from both the blue(O) and red(E) plates. The POSS is based on plates taken in two wavebands during the period 1949 to 1955. The blue plates were taken using Eastman 103a-O emulsion, and the red plate were taken with Eastman 103a-E emulsion and hence are commonly known as O and E plates respectively. The blue(O) band pass is primarily defined on the UV side by the transmission characteristics of the glass corrector and the atmosphere, and on the red side by the emulsion. The red(E) bandpass is primarily defined on the blue side by a coloured filter (red Plexiglas 2400 which is similar to Wratten 29). The red side is determined by the emulsion response."
Colored filters are used in amateur astrophotography to create color images from faint deep space objects. Three images are created each using one of three colored filters (Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan). Each image is then processed so that the white light on the image is changed to the color of the filter used for that Image and then the images are 'stacked' to produce a full color image. This is typically done when imaging brighter galaxies and nebula. (Astrophotography is a very technical and arcane hobby.) Professional astronomers don't do this because they want to capture the full spectrum of what their target so they can gather scientific data.
@@colincampbell767 - Bear in mind that what professional astronomers did 70 years ago would seem "amateur" today. From Google: "Color photography was not widely used until the 1960s because it was expensive." My father was a professional photographer and got out of the business in 1965 when his clients wanted to switch to color for their newspaper and magazine ads. He didn't want to replace his *black-and-white* with much more expensive *color* photo processing equipment and chemicals.
@@chilbiyitoits hard to explain 20 -30 hour playtime in a few sentences. I highly recommend playing this game! But basically you were born right at the end of the universe. And while exploring you slowly notice every star starts to go supernova one by one until its pitch black and your solar system is the last one left with an active star. Now its your turn to find out why...
Hi, I would like to share my own similar experience. Last month, I was taking 10 minutes long sub exposures during my astrophotography session, and then after downloading them on my computer, I was going through each sub (fits) to check for light streaks and clouds. Strangely, in one of the subs, there was a bright star present, but in the next one, it wasn't there. Surprisingly, it was truly bright one, and there were no other stars that appeared or disappered from the sub before or after that particular sub. For 2-3 days, I kept searching the web if anyone else has noted something similar, but then considering it just as some wierd isolated event, I forgot about it until I came across this video.
Hypothetical idea here. If those three stars were visible because of gravitational lensing only and the small but massive object causing the gravitational lensing is moving in our direction. Could it be possible we are inside the focal point of the gravitational lensing now and can no longer see them?
it would be very unlikely all three at the same time show up as dots of light and then disappearing because they were being lensed it would take too many coincidences
@@Razerfreak1dust on the telescope lenses doesn't appear on photos as it's not in focus There was a famous incident where a telescope mirror got shot with a gun and the image looks just the same
A spec is not how nuclear radiation effects these things. It has to be a certain type of film like for X-rays and such that is sensitive to radiation and it would be a whole lot of these "specs" like a hazing. One I dont think that these plates are sensitive to radiation and likely more akin to standard camera film. Two the evidence doesn't correlate with known effects of nuclear testing on the sensitive exposures made by kodak at the time
@@tylerdurdin8069 That is completely wrong. Radiation will affect the chemistry all films, no mater what they are normally designed to react to. That is how we got Becquerel's photographic plate. The starting point to figuring out that some material is radioactive.
If you go with the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox, maybe that’s a civilization deciding to go dark. It’s like when you have crazy neighbors that come knock on your door and you chose to turn off the lights so they think nobody’s home.
@@mleadenham1 If they have stellar remote sensing they might observe this weeks news here on Earth, use their AI to plot and prototype future scenarios of contact and have decided that their policy is by appointment only.
Anton, We are doing a similar project now and discovered that vanishing stars in some cases are asteroids and other objects that are transient NEOs. We use our remote observatory imagery that we have captured for years and compare the images to currently acquired images we take. Very good video thank you! Marc Dantonio SkyTour LiveStream
I was thinking of your son last night while looking at the full moon. The healing process is long, but you'll come out the other side with due time. Blessings to you and your family brother, love you.
Photons given off by your son are still traveling and odds are always increasing that each of us carries a nucleus or electron that was once identified as your son. We are all sending that love back to you wonderful person ❤
Could it be the flip side of gravitational lensing? We’re all used to seeing images or multiples thereof caused by gravitational effects on light. The focusing of that light means it’s not going where it otherwise would have. Is it possible that the light we were seeing suddenly got “lensed” in a different direction?
When the next door neighbor you don't like builds their Dyson sphere around ONE star... well, you can't just let them gloat over it. It's time to find yourself a nice trinary system to encapsulate.
@@akaimahomiru253 - Well it's like my neighbor who built his nice deck and would smirk and gloat every time I was sitting out on the lawn in a lawn chair. So then I needed to build a deck too... a bigger deck. So then he put up one of those retractable awning sun shade things. So then I had to roof my deck and screen it in so I could gloat while they swatted at bugs. I think swimming pools and jacuzzis will be next... and if it keeps going like this, we'll eventually graduate to Dyson spheres.
That plate with the 9 disappearing objects _is_ kind of spooky. It made me think of that scene on the last season of Game of Thrones where the Dothraki cavalry, with their flaming swords, charges out into the darkness to confront the Army of the Dead about to attack Winterfell, only for an advancing wave of darkness to extinguish every single one of those lights. Ok, I think I'm going to grab a bat and lock my bedroom's door now... 😅
Gotta love it when Anton explains the latest cosmological mystery and all the future winners of the RAS Gold Medal come out of the woodwork with the most... "clever", "original" solutions (ie: _it's just the different wavelength filter, innit? Oh, those silly career astrophysicists, what are they like..._ x20)
It always amazes just how much science is trying to figure out, even given the limits of our information. Hopefully we’ll still be able acquire the necessary information as we go, to unravel some of these ongoing mysteries.
If it's not dust, then perhaps it's some sort of light refraction or aberration inside the original telescope or on the photograph itself. I think it's a lot easier to make something appear that isn't really there, than to disappear something that really was there.
Especially in a one hour time frame...if not a contaminate, maybe the Roswell visitors👽 photo bombed the first pic and they were closer than can be determined, which could explain how they could disappear from that area within an hours time.🤪 If it was radioactive dust contaminate wouldn't it be detectable on photo paper or negative given the long half life of isotopes? Although I'm not sure of how these photos were developed. I'm basing my hypothesis on how photos used to be developed from early cameras.
@@frauleenijssens9353 Intensely radioactive isotopes, which would produce effects from a very small quantity of material, will in the nature of things have a short half-life and thus be long gone. Secondly, the film will be most sensitive before development, less so during it, and insensitive after fixing, and will have been washed thoroughly after each chemical bath, so even checking for radioactivity immediately after development would be unlikely to show anything even given an incredibly sensitive detector (like a photographic emulsion!). Of course, a second exposure taken even minutes later, being on a different plate or film, is not going to show the same spots.
Maybe it's due to some other inconsistency between the way two pictures were taken. If you compare the left picture with the right one, you notice that the left one has a lot more visible stars in general, not just the triplet. The left one also appears to further cropped out and zoomed in which makes me think the pictures were taken with different resolutions or exposures or something. I understand that those 3 stars, being among the more brighter ones in the picture shouldn't disappear like that even if the pictures are different, but the results would for sure be more reliable if both were taken under the same circumstances.
Absolutely, that was the first thing that I noticed as well. Every star in the right picture appears less bright than the left picture. I don't know what the difference between POSS1 Red and POSS1 Blue (upper right corner of image) is, but it definitely seems to be the variable causing such a dramatic and obvious difference. There is also another very large and bright star just to the lower left of the triple cluster in the right image that is completely missing as well.
The red and blue indicatse what wavelength of light the plates were measuring. The fact that they are differing wavelength plates seems like an obvious problem with the "conclusions".
Can these vanishing stars also be found when comparing plates from e.g the seventies or eighties to images of nowadays? If not, the problem lies in the fifties or in other words - on earth. If yes, it might be a cosmic problem.
I don't think he answered the question of if those three stars are there today. Still, if they were there in the plates during the 1950s until that hour if that day, and then were gone the next hour of that day, and did not reappear on any plates in future decades, that _is exactly how_ it would appear if those three stars really did stop shining on that day, during that hour. There are probably many different reasons for any given star to go out, the universe is a big place, and it is doubtful the same phenomenon would have affected all of them. However, in this case, we can be sure that all three in one trinary system didn't disappear from coincidentally different causes.
@@TheNoiseySpectator : I think the location probably hasn't been checked in enough detail (amateurs are limited in their telescope power by practicality limits), because another space RU-vidr (the bald guy involved with Universe Today) used the subject as his thumbnail a few days ago. Probably there hasn't been enough time for follow-up observations yet.
I find it odd that it is not mentioned in the video whether these stars are still "gone" or are again visible today. That would be important to know 🧐 Nobody's been looking at the spot since the 50s?
Maybe something big enough to block the view of those stars got in the way, in the 50s. If so, since it's still in the way, it's either stationary, heading directly away from us, or heading straight for us. Perhaps that's the real Trisolaris system, and we can't see it any more because the invasion fleet is so large it's been blocking the view for the last 70 years.
Photo film is sensitive to light, X-rays, Gama-rays and probably some other rays as well. The '50's would still be learning how to create specific sensitivity in films like IR, UV and X. They were still figuring out Gama. Rays from a blast 500 miles away would still reach them.
Wonderful Anton, yes, why do stars disappear from the screen (firmament)? I always try to give symbolic answers when the question seems difficult and there is no such simple solution, so here's an attempt on my part: 1) Stars are like fish and black holes are like fishermen, and sometimes a fish disappears on the fisherman's fishing rod and later in his mouth and stomach. 2) Just like here on our roads, accidents occur in space from time to time; collisions (mergers of stars) and explosions (supernovae) also occur! 3) Stars are living beings, just like us humans. So I think sometimes they get really tired, turn off the lights and go to sleep... 🤣
I camp on Palomar Mountain (not far from the observatory) and in Anza Borrego State Park which is in the desert just east of Palomar. While camping if looking to the east you will often see planes flying westward. What is important, the planes are not flying across but directly at and descending toward the observatory. Their lights tend to begin faintly and then grow brighter as they approach. They also relatively line up that you will see them stacking up behind each other. Just before they get completely overhead, they either turn north toward LA and Orange county or south toward San Diego. These could be either civilian or military aircraft. I was taken back with this mystery the first time I saw it, but when the planes banked their green and red side lights became visible. If one could obtain the arrival information for planes landing at that time, maybe this could explain the oddity.
I don't think so, the section of the sky is much larger than the space between L.A. and San Diego. To move so far that they would be out of view of anywhere covered by that photographic plate, they would have to move Very, VERY *VERY* FAST! Much, MUCH faster than the speed of light! Especially to get away in less than an hour! And, if they were still somewhere in the region covered by the photograph, the Astronomers would still spot them, and realize they were not a "newcomer stars" because they would be the same size and brightness as the missing trio.
Just a thought, but with the triple stars disappearing, one plate is labelled 'red' and the other 'blue'. If these colours represent filters used with a monochrome camera, then the stars might have been visible in one plate and not the other because of their spectral type. A predominantly blue star could be MUCH brighter when using a blue filter, and very dim, or even invisible when using a red filter ... and vice versa.
Ecept that the area has subsequently been examined and there is nothing there. There was probably noth8ng there to begin with, and the "stars" are just some sort of artefact in the image. All these dissappearing stars....is all that based on single images? Do we have multiple images of them confirming their existence? If not then it is probably just artefacts.
@@Unknown17 There are 5 filter colors that are commonly used in black and white photography - red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. Each lets through its own color of light and blocks other colors to varying degrees. For example, a red filter will let red light through, but block most green and blue. The result is that colors matching the filter color appear brighter in the final image, while other colors appear darker.
It's almost definitely contamination the kodak film company was actually ordered to stay quiet about the fallout affecting their film stock after the test's the wind blew fallout into the water tributary they used to wet wash one of the film chemical setting stages and they kept getting aberant spots from the actinides decaying on the surface leaving random spots of developed film from the cherenkov radiation induced in the film strip as the radioactive particle rips off outta there. Took their chemists a total of a coupla months to work out that they were dropping nukes at trinity and they were experiencing fallout lol.this was even before they had dropped the bomb in nagasaki may have already hit hiroshima by then but all very state secret shut up or you won't be in business :) .
Well, this should be REALLY easy to prove wrong, because if it was truly just an artefact of nuclear tests, then this effect must have been isolated to times of nuclear tests. Id bet when we compare photographs from 20 years ago to one's done today, we would find very similar results. We will continue to be able to watch stars disappear at a rate, and for reasons, we don't understand.
So there exists an alternative timeline where Kodak whistleblew and ousted the US government during the war? That might make a sick book or mini series.
Astronomer here. There is a possible simple explanation. Notice that the two archived images are in very different colors: POSS blue vs. POSS red. If these objects were very red (thus dim enough to be below the detection threshold in POSS blue) orbiting the Sun at distance (so they move but don't causing streaking) and gravitionally bound (they move together), it could explain why they were visible in POSS red, not in POSS blue, and were no longer there when revisited decades later.
We love your work ! I love having a respected fellow RU-vidr that we can rely on giving me the new scientific information. You are my go to guy when news comes out
Do we have a subsequent photo of the same area to determine if the objects re-appeared later? If so, could this be explained by a transit of a closer object, obscuring the view?
@@jeffmosesjrno a black hole would actually magnify the light and it would seemed stretched. These stars are just not there. Something has harvested them.
9:40 this was slightly misinterpreted - in the paper, they test a scenario in which these objects are causally linked (a fair assumption, given that they all went dim within 50 minutes) in order to set a maximum limit on how far these objects are from *one another*. They find that this distance, given (50 minutes * the speed of light), is about 6 astronomical units (6 times the distance from the earth to the sun). Now, given that they are at most 6 au apart, the researchers used their angular separation in the sky to construct a maximum distance to the objects from Earth, which is the ~2 light years that you cited. So in summary, if the objects are causally linked (triggered by something), they can be no more than 6 AU apart from each other and no more than 2 light years away from earth. Of course, they could be much closer.
I was camping in the back of my truck watching the heavens in Hat creek California. If anyone knows what that's like, you will know that the view of the stars up there is like nothing you've ever seen. It's magnificent! The stars blanket the sky and you can see it all. Anyway,my girlfriend at the time was with me to observe this also. What looked like the stars in deep space began to move and change positions. We watched dozens of stars doing this. It was breath taking. I am a life long sky watcher and have experienced many amazing sightings in my life. I know what planes,jets,satellites, starlink,spacestion excetra are. This like I said was in deep space .stars were stationary then like I said began changing positions . Never seen that before nor have I seen it since. Amazing! Things are not what they seem people. This universe is intelligently controlled. And no,we were not on drugs. Lol 😊
You need to go to the dark sky preserves in the southern hemisphere. Best views of the night skies - and the Milky Way itself - you'll see anywhere on earth.
You don't know that for sure. Whoever took them may have done so out of just plain avariciousness (greed)! And, we don't need them at all, that is not the problem. The problem is what if they next come after _our_ sun!
This story has nothing to do with a "concern" as why these star like objects disappeared, but simply WHY they disappeared. It is a mystery for astronomers. Or a curiosity.
Hmm, the left hand image, with the three 'stars,' has 'POSS1 Red' while the right hand image has 'POSS1 Blue.' Could this be an artifact due to the three 'stars' not emitting any blue light?
Good catch! The POSS red would be in the infrared range?(invisible to our eyes) but the objects dont show up on POSS blue. So not detected in the optical but identified in the infrared range.. it narrows down what they could be. Need to see same area at a later time to see if they truly "vanished", but perhaps they're still there. That seems like too simple an answer...am I missing something?
@@frauleenijssens9353 I should've looked at the paper before posting. On page 3 they show the same location in red and blue 2 months later and the 'stars' are missing in the red. It still could be something that wasn't visible with the blue filter and could've taken much longer to 'vanish' (as opposed to 50 minutes), but to have three seems to stretch that idea. That said, if you compare the red to blue and look at around the 80,60 pixels for red (bottom first) and 100,140 for the blue, there are clearly objects that 'vanish' between red and blue, so not totally implausible. I noticed that arrangement quickly, might've even subliminally done so watching Anton's video, but a quick scan indicates there may be others.
Do they have to be distant? This could be within the solar system or even closer than the moon. They could be objects in the Oort cloud, These might be the first UFO pictures with a telescope, basically Earth observing craft from other races, autonomous or a live crew. Or maybe something exotic like the opening of transient wormholes.
cadenrolland. Sometimes, stars are not what they appear to be. Only when you zoom into them do you see what they really are. Possible reason for these so-called stars disappearing, they've simply turned their lights off. And there are illuminated craft out there. Fact.
The bigger mystery is figuring out why stars aren't blinking out (and eventually back in) constantly in our field of view. It wouldn't take a very big object to interrupt our line of sight to stars that are so far away.
Space is mostly empty, the whole universe we see has average of six protons per cubic meter. That includes all the stars, planets, dust... the volume is so very big compared to all the "stuff" there is mostly nothing there. Lucky for us otherwise we couldn't see most the observable universe from where we sit.
@ApPersonaNonGrata Actually, I think that is the same question. But, No, Aliceberethar is right; to block out all the light from a trinary star system would take something Absolutely, unrealistically, gigantically huge, And to move entirely across the "sky" out of that photograph's range and over that specific spot in the sky and eclipsing nothing else, it would have to move at a tremendous speed, many times more than the speed of light! Especially to get here in what would be less than an hour when observed from Earth.
So if the universe is expanding, is it possible for some stars to eventually be moving away faster than their light can reach us? Wouldnt this be happening all the time?
At time 8:18 those two pictures are actually showing two different part of the light spectrum. You can see the note on upper right corner saying RED and BLUE. I assume, that it corresponds to a filter used to take the picture. So the 3 stars in the middle and another 3 above are emmiting only red light which of course it is not visible in blue filtered image. That is how it disapears.
Have we attempted to look for some of these missing objects at longer wavelengths? Could the wavelengths have shifted out of the detectable range? Perhaps the wavelengths shifted from visible light to infrared and can no longer be detected in visible spectrum, requiring a different observation platform. Also it seems that high energy particles could also have caused some of these objects. Have we compared the observation dates to that of nuclear test dates?
Is it possible that they were projections from a gravitational lens further back along the line of observation, and that they later rotated out of alignment?
The distortions caused by such a lens would have been observed as the massive body moved in front of them. The so-called “Einstein ring,” for example, if the body passed directly in front of them, or a kind of crescent shape if it passed in front of them somewhat off to any side.
Einstein ring is when you are outside the focal point but still in line of sight, what you might be seeing here is Einstein cross, when you are close to the focal point
The images are taken through different filters. In the upper right corner one says Red and the other Blue. The "disappearance" may be nothing more than certain wavelengths being filtered out.
Unlikely. Sure, two Borgs annihilating each other over a parking spot for their Borg Cube. That must happen all the time. But three of them!? Come on - Get real!
Anton, if you and I were stranded on a deserted island and I got one half and you got the other, with my side having all the food and water but your side had nothing but hops and barley. Do you think this particular condition would promote communication between us?
amazing, is by these mysteries that we are inspired to learn more. Everyone should feel so humbled by the shear amount of stuff we just don't know. Is also amazing that scientists can process such amount of data nowadays, even re-processing old data and involve citizen-scientists in the process.
Could the triple objects be nearby objects (within a few light years) that were hit by a high energy event (eg a gamma ray burst) that produced enough light for them to be detected in the first picture - by the time of the second picture the event had passed.
A few times I have idly wondered: How can we be sure that things like causality apply the same everywhere? Vs, being a more localized phenomena. Say, for example, if for nearby space pretty much every atom is consistent; but this consistency falls off with distance. Given enough distance, small features could start vary randomly, based mostly on probability. Given enough distance, stars could flicker into and out of existence depending on the probability of a star having existed in that location (from the perspective of the observer), ... Though, I guess, one can always build better telescopes to try to sort this out (say, to verify that the stars always remain the same, or alternately, maybe if far across the universe, possibly even whole galaxies are flickering into and out of existence...).
This is true, the galaxy and universe is not expanding, we are in a gravitational cusp and accelerate towards the cusp. You are standing on one cusp that is collapsing as it is collapsing into another cusp and so on. All of these cusps are shrinking and liberating energy from mass. The outside isn't getting bigger, we are getting smaller.
I’d really appreciate it if the admin of the simulation at least felt obligated to appear to us every year or so metaphysically to explain things or just comfort us to inadvertently save us from ourselves every once in a while yknow?
I once saw a pair of star fading away with my very own eyes. They look like a pair of eyes closing in the distant night starry sky. My hypothesis is that quantum mechanic effects extend all the way to macroscopic objects, astronomical sized objects included. Always would be a small chance that when looking a way from an object, the next time you try to see it, the object would appear somewhere else. Although a simple calculation would lead to an astronomical low probability to such event to occur, here we are seeing an astronomical number of objects and therefore once in a while one of those objects look like has vanished. That also would explain why some people report object switching places in their houses (Well, technically, the explanation in this case would need to be more elaborate, but I hope you got the idea).
At 5:40 stated that a lot of nuclear testing was going on New Mexico after WW II during the beginning of the Cold war, but that is not true. The only nuclear test in New Mexico was on July 16, 1945 at the Trinity site. This was followed two weeks later with the bombing of Hiroshima folliwed by Nagasaki in early August. During the cold war no further nuclear testing was done in New Mexico. The nuclear testing was moved to the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific in 1946. And testing was started in 1951 in Nevada. The Nevada testing site is also much closer to the Mt Palomar observatory. About 400 miles almost due north.
I have a question for y’all… I couldn’t find any good answers to my question online. They all seemed to far off. About 2 months ago me and a friend of mine witnessed a star heavily fluctuating in brightness. It was very bright at one point and then abruptly lost brightness. Sometimes it would be very very bright for about 3 minutes and sometimes it was just kind of normal in brightness. There was no pattern it was very random. At one point it wasn’t even visible at all. We witnessed this for about 2 hours. No we didn’t consume any drugs and no it was not due to clouds or the atmosphere. We clearly saw what was going on. I have never seen something like that and I still wonder to this day what we witnessed. And it was completely stationary so no Ufo/plane type stuff. Thankyou for taking your time!
There are many reason for a start to appear dimming or brighten for a moment. Start with atmosphere where smoke, water vapor, or even just different temperatures can scatter or focus light from stars we see. That's why they sent Hubble and James Webb telescope out in the vacuum. If the pattern seemed random, most of the time it's the atmosphere. Stars usually follow a pattern except some freak occurrence happen, but that's a very low probability.
Obi-Wan : I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
As I recall there was an issue with fallout contamination at the Kodak film stock factory during the nuclear testing. None of these cases presented here showed two photos with an object present, that disappears in a later one. They all show only one image as being the only evidence for the object. Until we see otherwise, contamination of film stock at manufacture or processing is by far the most likely cause and not an astronomical mystery at all.
I stick with the explanation that what we see are powerful engines of starships. Just because. By the way, if we could see emissions like that, the spaceship could fly exactly away from us, like Anton mentioned, or exactly towards us in a deacceleration burn. Learned that watching The Expanse. 😅
Max. Your explanation could be closer to the truth than what you think.While taking a video of what I thought was a star on 27.05.19 at 1.20am, I accidentally zoomed into an elongated craft that was pointed at the front and appeared to be artificially illuminated towards the rear built-up area. I enhanced a photo taken from the video that shows what I call a battleship shaped craft. It could also be the reason why stars disappear.They've moved or turned the lights off.
I remember an old spook saying, "once an accident, twice a coincidence, but three times is enemy action". This, along with unexplained explosions in the middle of intergalactic nowhere, makes this old spook wonder. Is there somebody out there cleaning house?
So the mystery is 3 stars whom orbit each other were found, and within less than a hour proofed an can’t be found again??? What could cause this to happen? 1.) black hole- this maybe could cause the death of man stars but would not eat them without a trace.( disc lit up from 3 stars worth of plasma ect) 2. Fast moving stars- as I’m likely as it sounds these 3 stars can be ejected out there place of origin and roaming the universe at hundreds thousands miles a hour.( but we would again see signs of there movement away.) 3. Something blocking the view- this could of been a lease effect from a different direction vs our position to view the stars, our view is blocked, many things can block the view)
These Palomar sky surveys are in different bands (red and blue) - this triplet is in the red, and not in the blue. I would suspect a very red object, which means that it didn't have to change rapidly in a few hours. The multiplicity suggests a gravitational lens.
At 8:12, you can see that the objects were present in the red filter images, then gone in the blue filter images. A contamination of the red filter? I've had filter contamination issues with my astrophotography setup, although no disappearing stars. Maybe even an object that only emits red spectrum light?
It did not all begin with this observatory. Modern scientific observatory work probably started at Greenwich in England (Europe). Or with Tycho Brahe in Denmark. Hundred’s of years of observational data to the longest timeline and best accuracy are available and still in use today. But a prominent US observatory is well worth mentioning. 👍😀🤓
It’s the Romulan star empire testing its new phaser canons. Thanks Anton for being so serious and sensible, when the universe is obviously not being sensible!
I always like simple explanations because they are easiest to justify. One star disappearing is strange, but three in the same location, very unusual. Something big got between us and the stars and is hiding the stars, especially if it only took 50 seconds. Three stars don't disappear simulatenously like that in the space of 50 seconds, unless there is a glitch in the matrix, and someone failed to pay the electricity bill in that region on time.
As some others have said, an object or dark cloud occluding those specific close-together light sources should have been mentioned as a possibility. It all really depends on what other photographs of that exact area before and after when those two plates were exposed shows. Were the objects there before that? Are they back now? At what wavelengths? The triple 'stars' might be a set of things that are very red-shifted, and so do not appear with a narrow blue filter. Without the critical information as to whether this was wavelength dependent, physical photographic plate dependent, or time dependent, and in what manner, we are all just speculating in the dark. I assume someone is going to point something powerful at that area and get us some answers eventually.
Or maybe the plates displayed are different wavelengths of light? Your video indicates that the plate at 08:52 is “red”, and the one at 09:45 is “blue”. Therefore small red dwarfs would be very faint in blue light but very strong in red and infrared, right?
A humoristic view at this unexplainable event is that it became to expensive to " run the whole show " so, something decides to flipping some switches to turn out the lights forever.
I have been doing developing and printing from Photographic film for over 40 years. Contamination is really hard to entirely remove and all types of radiation affect films or plates.
Upon closer examination at 11:05 you can see two stars (right below the triple of stars that disappeared) seem to have gotten significantly brighter. This seems to indicate some kind of large dust cloud.
A new study has revealed that over 100 stars that were visible in photographic plates taken in the 1950s have disappeared from view. The research was carried out by comparing scans of photographic plates taken by the US Naval Observatory between 1950 and 2000, and comparing them with those taken by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System between 2010 and 2015. The authors of the study suggest that the stars may have gone supernova, or been obscured by dust or gas in the Milky Way. Alternatively, the stars may have simply become too faint to be seen, or they may have collapsed into black holes. The disappearance of the stars has been described as “mysterious” and “almost impossible to explain”. While previous studies have identified disappearing stars, the latest vanishings are the most extensive and have occurred in multiple locations. The study is part of the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project, which aims to identify celestial bodies that have appeared or disappeared over time, and to determine the reasons why.
1. If it was a problem with the camera/telescope, as soon as the camera looked at a different location, the exact same stars would be in the exact same position. So identifying this is child play. Tiny bubbles of impurities could cause refraction and diffraction issues for instance, or indeed chip based sensor arrays with bad cells. 2. That leaves atmospheric phenomena that physically obstructs the view and/or mimics stars, or genuine stars that appear and disappear, or doctoring. Doctoring would appear to serve no purpose, although there is a chance of atmsopheric obscurity or mimics. 3. Assuming the stars have actually faded in and out of our observational capabilities, is not the same as stars actually fading in and out of existance. For instance I am sure there are plenty of satellite images with areas of interest that national agencies prefer obscured and therefore wont be found, even if they exist. All that said, our ability to focus distant stars still comes down to the refractive index of the medium that is being traversed by light and/or more correctly, localised variable mediums over a very long journey. Any number of factors could change that. Even if not to the degree of obvious or extreme gravitational lensing. Obviously though its competing aliens with death stars fighting it out.
My initial thought was misfires (less than 1000 events within decades seems to be a tiny number), so stars unable to sustain their ignition. But I am totally unaware of any studies related to failed star ignition.
I've read this book. Our next step is confirm it from one of our observation stations a few hundred light years away in a few hundred years time. We mustn't penetrate the barrier but in a lot of ways it's too late. Part of what was sealed away was already here and in fact paid for the observations in order to spur us to unleash it.
What about multiple black holes getting in the way. Let's say that there was 1 black hole in the way causing gravitational lensing, making it appear as if there are 3 stars. Then another black hole passed in front of the first black hole, causing more distortion of light. Would this scenario just increase the lensing making more stars appear visibly, or would it indefinitely trap the light that is making it's way around the first black hole?
11:53 - I'm assuming "Red" (left photo, top-right), and "blue" (right photo, top-right), is the color filter used for the photo. Maybe these objects are not visible in blue wavelengths?
I remember that science fiction short story were scientist are sending out messages into space and after years are suddenly excited to get a reply. When they eventually decode it they discover it says “Keep quite or they are going to find you”
One possible solution could be wandering blck holes. Coming near star with quite fast speeds, like 1/3 of light speed, does not give time for matter to really expand from the star. So when star and black hole encounters each others, star just vanishes to the black hole. We have seen a galaxy ejecting its black hole with huge speeds, so we really have these wandering black holes without their galaxies. And this could also explain 3 missing stars. If those were actually a single star that had gravitational lensing effect due to nearing black hole. Black hole just ate 1 star, because there never were 3 stars... Also there could be a single event that was already explained, but the 3 stars that were seen were actually only 1 star seen through gravitational lensing... So, one gravitational lensed star is missing? It is like all of those other 1 000 stars that are missing, in gravitational lensing situation. Or do we have good enough data to take out possible gravitational lensing? But these are mere guesses.
Haha! Yes! Now I just have to find the paper (or voice note) that predicted this behavior! I was waiting for such a discovery. Actually, I thought I might have to wait and see different stars appear and disappear to see both sides for evidence. But in one video I got both! Always can get something from Anton. Love the info spill. Way to stay on top of things.
