In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished—astronomers still can't find them
In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished—astronomers still can't find them
phys.org
In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished—astronomers still can't find them
20 comments
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The article says it happened many times back in those days and this is just one example. If modern scopes and AI haven't seen anything like this then I'm quite confident that it was a problem with their tooling back then, with radioactive dust being the top contender.
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Well that's a lot less terrifying than the possibility of a multi-star-destroying dark forest attack.
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The question is: On how many observations before 1952 could these three stars be identified? Could the platter of 08:52 simply be contaminated?
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Didn’t realize they had pixelated photos in 1952…
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The public library in my town when I was a kid in the 80s replaced their card catalog with a touchscreen computer system. It barely worked, sometimes you had to press below where you were supposed to press, but the idea was cool.
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That was a super interesting little dive thank you.
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Bug in software. They were removed by garbage collector even though their reference can still be accessed. Hence render inconsistency.
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Anyone else get the X-files theme in their head after reading that title?
Just read the article, my money's on radioactive dust.
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I guess they went to spend their holidays in Andromeda or something.
20 comments
The third option, radiation damage to the plates, sounds the most plausible to me.
It would pre-expose the plate in the same manner as a double exposure in a roll of film so the "stars" would have already been on the plate before use.
We could point the JWST at it just to be sure though.
the ones that went "missing" look different than the rest of the stars too. Too bright and chunky in my opinion