The stars of the universe are disappearing: astronomers probe the stars appearing and disappearing

A deep, dense and cold space offers a range of mysteries which, by unraveling, explain the existence of life, the origin and the history of evolution. The stars are one of the most fascinating and brilliant elements in dark space. For a very long time, astronomers accepted the idea that bright objects in the sky are fixed and unchanging.

The stars don’t disappear in the air – or at least? An international collaboration of astronomers has followed a curious occurrence of disappearance and appearance of celestial objects resembling nine stars in small regions.

Collaborating scientists from different countries including Sweden, Spain, the United States, Ukraine and India, including scientists from ARIES, have followed the disappearance and appearance of celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with the new modern images. The comparison of the images led to the recording of unnatural phenomena which in turn led to probing the recording of changes in the Universe.

Probe the disappearance of stars

Physical objects in the universe, like the sun, undergo major changes very slowly over time scales of millions or billions of years. When massive stars, whose mass is heavier than the sun, undergo cataclysmic changes near the end of their life, their demise is marked by a supernova explosion, which continues to glow for many months. Therefore, the sudden disappearance of the stars seems impossible and scientists are trying to detect the viable reasons behind the disappearance of the objects.

Night sky images dated April 12, 1950, used to study transient stars that were not found in the photographs half an hour later and have not been traced since. Astronomers have found no explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lenses, rapid radio bursts, or any variable stars that could be responsible for this rapidly changing cluster in the sky.

Gran Telescopio Canarias used for in-depth period observations

The world’s largest optical telescope, Gran Telescopio Canarias, with a diameter of 10.4 meters, carried out the deep observations of the second epoch to probe the mystery of transient stars. The team hoped to find a counterpart to the position of each object that appeared and disappeared on the plate.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias is located at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma (2,326 meters [7,631 feet]) in the Canary Islands in Spain. The telescope mirror consists of 36 hexagonal pieces. To observe any point in the sky, the telescope is mounted in a system that moves both in altitude and in azimuth. Construction and design of the GTC began in 2000, while the first observation was made in 2007.

VASCO project: In search of exotic transients

Modern time domain studies, exploring the sky, have found tens of thousands of variable or flaming stars, supernovae, asteroids, and variable active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and various interesting discoveries.

In the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, a 70-year time baseline was probed using data from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO). According to the research paper “Exploring Nine Transients Occurring Simultaneously on April 12, 1950”, researchers claim that 9 simultaneous transients are incompatible with any well-known natural explanation.

Among the possible explanations, the first is the high energy contamination of photographic plates, likely to be caused by radioactive particles. Researchers say this is not an unreasonable explanation for a time when numerous atomic bomb tests were carried out in the United States and the Soviet Union. However, a fact remains intact that no atomic bomb tests were carried out between 1949 and 1951 which indicates that during the exposure of the plate and during its storage time, the plates were normally developed on the same night as the ‘observation, therefore an alternative astronomical explanation can be considered. More than ever, researchers are now eager to search for more signatures of solar reflections in this digitized 1950s data in the hopes of finding aliens.