NEW YORK, BRONX (ORDO News) — On July 19, 1952, an amazing event occurred at the Palomar Observatory while photographing the night sky. While taking several photographs of the same area to identify asteroids, the presence of three stars grouped together was discovered on one of the photographic plates.
However, just under an hour later, when the same area was photographed again, the stars had completely disappeared without a trace.
The disappearance of stars is an unprecedented phenomenon. Stars may explode or experience temporary brightness, but they don’t just disappear. However, the photographic evidence was undeniable. Three stars were clearly visible in the first image, but were absent in the second.
The prevailing assumption was that they faded quickly, but even this explanation was problematic. Subsequent observations found no evidence that the stars were fainter than 24th magnitude, suggesting they had dimmed by a factor of 10,000 or more. This raises the question of what could have caused such a sharp and rapid fading.
One hypothesis is that the three stars were not separate entities, but rather a single star that experienced a brief period of brightness, possibly caused by a rapid radio flare from the magnetar.
It is believed that a stellar-mass black hole passed between the star and Earth at this time, causing the flare to be gravitationally lensed and briefly appear in three separate images. Although this explanation seems plausible, such an event is extremely rare.
However, other photographs from the 1950s also captured the rapid disappearance of several stars, some of which were separated by minutes of arc, making gravitational lensing an unlikely cause.
Another theory suggests that the three bright spots were not stars at all. Their proximity to each other within 10 arcseconds indicates that they could be caused by an external factor to simultaneously increase brightness.
Given a time interval of about 50 minutes, it is estimated that the objects could be no more than 6 astronomical units (AU) apart, which corresponds to a distance of no more than 2 light years.
This proximity suggests that these were Oort cloud objects whose brightness was caused by a common event and then began to drift in their orbits, which explains why subsequent observations failed to detect them.
The third hypothesis suggests that the three objects are not celestial bodies, but are the result of contamination of photographic plates.
The Palomar Observatory was located in close proximity to the deserts of New Mexico, where nuclear weapons testing was conducted. It is likely that radioactive dust from these tests contaminated the photographic plates, creating bright spots in some images and leaving others unaffected.
This explanation becomes even more plausible when we consider that similar disappearances were observed on other photographic plates from the 1950s.
Despite these intriguing theories, the true cause of the disappearing stars remains unclear. To shed light on this mystery, it is necessary to capture such events in modern sky surveys, allowing immediate follow-up observations. Only then can we hope to solve this mystery, which has haunted scientists for several decades.
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News agencies contributed to this report, edited and published by ORDO News editors.
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