- Reaction score
- 1,697
Explanations range from failed supernova to (much more unlikely) Dyson Spheres.
Earlier this week we reported the story of three stars that back in July 1952 disappeared within an hour from the night sky forever, leaving behind a mystery with several possible explanations. But these are not the only stars that have gone missing, not by a long shot. In 2019, the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project attempted to catalog how many stars have disappeared from view in the last 70 years and found around 100 missing without a concrete explanation.
The VASCO project compared images taken by the US Naval Observatory from 1949 onwards with images from the Pan-STARRS sky survey between 2010 and 2014. The software used by the team came back with around 150,000 potential sources of light that had disappeared in the intervening years.
They then cross-referenced with other datasets to narrow it down further. This process left them with 24,000 candidates, which they then manually went through to exclude camera malfunctions and other errors. At the end of it, they had around 100 promising candidates for real sources of light that disappeared from our view.
www.iflscience.com
Earlier this week we reported the story of three stars that back in July 1952 disappeared within an hour from the night sky forever, leaving behind a mystery with several possible explanations. But these are not the only stars that have gone missing, not by a long shot. In 2019, the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project attempted to catalog how many stars have disappeared from view in the last 70 years and found around 100 missing without a concrete explanation.
The VASCO project compared images taken by the US Naval Observatory from 1949 onwards with images from the Pan-STARRS sky survey between 2010 and 2014. The software used by the team came back with around 150,000 potential sources of light that had disappeared in the intervening years.
They then cross-referenced with other datasets to narrow it down further. This process left them with 24,000 candidates, which they then manually went through to exclude camera malfunctions and other errors. At the end of it, they had around 100 promising candidates for real sources of light that disappeared from our view.
Hundreds Of Stars Have Vanished Without A Trace. Where Did They Go?
Explanations range from failed supernova to (much more unlikely) Dyson Spheres.
www.iflscience.com
