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In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished—astronomers still can't find them (phys.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by paul0207@lemmy.sdf.org to c/astronomy@mander.xyz

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/6593278

On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a magnitude of 15, they were reasonably bright in the image. At 9:45 pm the same region of sky was captured again, but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. In less than an hour they had completely vanished.

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[–] sethboy66@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The possible reasons are all pretty bland; gravitational lensing, nebular refracting, or they weren't stars at all but rather asteroids (with a vector of motion in-line to that of the LoS of the observation).

It's not like these stars had ever been catalogued before the first plate, so its not like these objects were long-standing unchanging phenomena that suddenly disappeared. These are hour-long transients of which there have been hundreds recorded.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Shut up Wesley