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An international collaboration of astronomers has identified a curious occurrence of nine star-like objects that appeared and disappeared in a small region within half an hour on an old photographic plate.
Astronomers collaborating across countries track the disappearance and appearance of celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with new modern images, record unnatural phenomena and probe these phenomena deeply to record changes in the sky. ‘universe.
Scientists from Sweden, Spain, the United States, Ukraine and India, including Alok Gupta of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Nainital, studied an early form of photography that used glass plates to capture images of the night sky from April 12, 1950, exhibited at the Palomar Observatory in California.
They detected these transient stars, which were not found in the photographs half an hour later and have not been traced since. Such a group of objects appearing and disappearing at the same time was detected for the first time in the history of astronomy.
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.
The study, recently published in Nature’s “Scientific Reports”, was led by Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias in Spain.
They used the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (the world’s largest optical telescope) in the Canary Islands in Spain to make deep observations of the second epoch.
The team hoped to find a counterpart to the position of each object that appeared and disappeared on the plate. The counterparts found are not necessarily physically connected to the strange objects.
“Scientists are exploring the reason behind the sighting of these strange transient stars and are still not sure what triggered their appearance and disappearance. The only thing we can say for sure is that these images contain objects resembling stars that shouldn’t be there. We don’t know why they’re there, “Gupta said.
Astronomers are examining the possibility that the photographic plates were contaminated with radioactive particles, causing false stars on the plates.
But if the observation turns out to be real, another option is solar reflections from reflective, unnatural objects orbiting the Earth several years before the launch of the first human satellite, the Department of Science and Technology said. .
Astronomers, who are part of the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) collaboration, have yet to identify the root cause of the “nine simultaneous transients.”
They are now eager to search for more signatures of solar reflections in this digitized 1950s data in hopes of finding aliens.
(PA)
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