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More than 70 years ago, astronomers were doing a photographic survey of the night sky when something odd happened: three bright stars vanished between shots, never to be seen again., a not-yet-peer-reviewed study by an international group of researchers has offered new potential explanations to the 1952 mystery, when astronomers atHere's how it went down: on July 19, 1952, Palomar was taking photos of the night sky at multiple points to get shots of things like asteroids.
But by 9:45pm that same night, when the observatory captured another photo of the same portion of the sky where the cluster had been seen less than an hour before, the "stars" were gone — and although people keep looking, they've never seen spotted again.The prevailing assumption in the intervening decades has been that the stars suddenly dimmed for some as-yet-unknown reason, going from a brightness magnitude of 15 to one so low that it could not be detected by the observatory.
Flash-forward to 2023. While astronomers still don't know why the stars vanished — or indeed, if they were even stars at all — this new research posits three potential explanations: that they were a single star magnified into three, that they were a different kind of stellar object, or that they had been vestiges of something Earthbound, such as nuclear testing dust.
The first theory would rely on the extraordinary happenstance of capturing a rare stellar event, like a fast radio burst from a magnetar neutron star, at just the right second. If the ensuing black hole occurred between the exploding star and us, it could, the researchers suggest, refract its light back to us into three points of light that would have looked like three stars to a 1950s observatory telescope.
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