Any number of garden variety phenomena could explain these flickers-red dwarf flares, variable stars that dimmed below Pan-STARRS’s sensitivity, or the afterglow of a gamma ray burst, to name a few. They most likely indicate brief flashes, captured by chance by the original USNO survey, that have long since faded to black, Villarroel says. If further observations confirm that the disappearances represent real astronomical events, they could fall into two categories. “We have done the best work to remove anything that resembles any artifacts,” Villarroel says. In the end, they found about 100 sources that truly appeared to have vanished. Finally, they scrutinized the remaining 24,000 candidates, one by one, to see which represented real points of light as opposed to camera malfunctions or similar accidents. They cross-referenced those missing lights with images from other datasets to isolate the especially promising possibilities.
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The group used software to analyze the 600 million light sources that should have appeared in both datasets and came up with about 150,000 candidates that appeared to have winked out. The study authors stress that while their preliminary findings almost certainly represent natural and well-understood events, they hope that future results will be relevant to astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). /rebates/&.com252fCosmic-Perspective-The-Solar-System-with-Starry-Night-Pro-6-Student-DVD-Sky-and-Telescope-and-Mastering-Astronomy-6-Edition252f9780321743978252fJeffrey-O-Bennett. The vanished light sources could represent short-lived flashes in the night or, possibly, the disappearance of a lasting heavenly body, if researchers can indeed confirm what they’re seeing.
After years of painstaking work, they recently announced their first results in the Astronomical Journal: at least 100 pinpricks of light that appeared in mid-20th century skies may have gone dark today. But what if we just haven’t been watching closely enough? What if our night sky is changing?Ī group of astronomers aims to shake that assumption of stability with the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) Project, by comparing 70-year-old surveys with recent images of the night sky to see what might have gone missing.
After all, navigators have steered their ships using fixed stellar patterns for centuries, and our eyes still trace the same outlines of the same heroes and villains that star gazers have identified for millennia. History would have us believe that the night sky is permanent and unchanging.
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