PIB Delhi — An international collaboration of astronomers has identified a curious occurrence of nine stars like objects that appeared and vanished in a small region within half an hour in an old photographic plate.Astronomers collaborating across counties track vanishing and appearing celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with new modern one, register unnatural phenomena, and probe deep into such phenomena to record changes in the Universe.
Scientists from Sweden, Spain, USA, Ukraine, and India, including Dr. Alok C. Gupta, Scientist from ARIES, investigated early form of photography that used glass plates to capture images of the night sky from the 12th of April 1950, exposed at Palomar Observatory in California, USA and detected these transient stars which were not to be found in photographs half an hour later and not traced since then. Such a group of objects appearing and disappearing at the same time have been detected for the first time in the history of astronomy.
The astronomers have not found any explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lensing, fast radio bursts, or any variable star that could be responsible for this cluster of fast changes in the sky.
Dr. Alok C. Gupta, Scientist from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, an autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, participated in this study which was recently published in Nature’s “Scientific Reports”. The study led by Dr. Beatriz Villarroel of Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, Stockholm, Sweden, and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, used the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (the largest optical telescope around the world) at Canary Islands, Spain, to do deep second epoch observations. The team hoped to find a counterpart at the position of every object that had appeared and vanished on the plate. The counterparts found are not necessarily physically connected to the weird objects.
The scientists are still exploring the reasons behind the observation of these strange transient stars and are still not sure about what triggered their appearance and disappearance. “The only thing we can say with certainty is that these images contain star-like objects that should not be there. We do not know why they are there,” says Dr. Alok C. Gupta.
The astronomers are examining the possibility that the photographic plates were contaminated with radioactive particles causing false stars on the plates. But if the observation is proven to be real, another option is solar reflections from reflective, unnatural objects in orbit around Earth several years before the first human satellite was launched.
The astronomers who belong to the collaboration Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) have still not sorted out the root cause of the “nine simultaneous transients”. They are now eager to look for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitized data from the 1950s in a hope to find aliens.
I have seen these star lately and have also seen what appear to be really bright stars around them and they look like they are signalling little ships l first notice l started seeing these three stars in the sky and they only apair in certain areas then l noticed where these stars are there are those star in the photo U got and also really bright stars and they sparkle and flash and turn different colours like they signalling pathways in the sky so l keep watching in sky’s at night now l have only seen this in two areas lve been in as l keeped following stars l started noticing othere things that look like lines of ships in the sky they in lines so l show couple m8s and my partner and one min they there next they gone but it looks like they docking into ship or some thing as U can see little flash’s before the disappear and every time l have seen them those same stars are around more so when moon is out if l had strong enough camera l could show the world last week there also appeared re star that had a tail looked like a comment might be able to get photo of it and it was also in the sky with those other stars that are there still right now at night but U can see them better when moon is out especially when moon is full