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Sci-Fi Space Science

Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say (cnet.com) 289

Posted by BeauHD from the something-is-missing dept.
Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). CNET reports: On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there. Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.

The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing. Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations. "Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."
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Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say More

Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say

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  • Of course there is... Something is between us and the object. The interstellar medium could be plenty of very cold objects that could hide the object behind.
    Rogue planets and other enough dense structures that don't generate heat.

    A interstellar eclipse.

    • Re:There is no known physical process? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @03:41AM (#59535944)

      And three years later this object is STILL perfectly in the way of being able to see the star from our point in space?

      • You're meant to jump straight to it being a Dyson Sphere...

        • I rather jump to some sort of interstellar superweapon that can blow stars up.

          Yes, it's actually easier to do that than build a Dyson sphere. It's always been way easier to destroy than to create.

          • Well, Disney did actually chew up a few stars for The Force Awakens after all, apparently.

            • Well, I wouldn't exactly call the actors it stars.

              • Technically, you are correct. A movie star (from Broadway origins) is someone whose name appears above the name of the show on the marquee. In movie poster terms, if you look at the squirrely text at the bottom, their names would appear before the name of the movie.

                For this movie's official poster, it reads:

                A LUCASFILM production A (something) production "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" Mark Hamill Carrie Fisher (Ren) (Rey) (Finn) (Po) etc.

                So not even Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher count as stars in this

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
              But first Disney unleashed its destructive power on the franchise itself.
          • In the Three Body trilogy there's a nice chapter about some grunt whose job it is to wipe out one star after another, day in and day out, whenever some civilization betrays its location, or some enemy betrays its location. (It's usually nothing, but doesn't hurt to be safe).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          If it's a Dyson sphere it would be fairly easy to identify from its infrared radiation. As mentioned in the linked paper.

      • Yes, a dust cloud can be as large as several galaxies. What do we know? Or very close to the star, maybe even forming a sphere around it.

        It is the obvious first thing to check for, and note how it was NOT mentioned. Whether you like it or not.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        Obviously. We are not moving that much when you consider interstellar distances. Neither is the star. If it's an object that is closer to the star than to us and is also relatively slow moving it could eclipse it for years and years. Since the object could be tiny (it only has to hide a point of light after all) and very far away, it wouldn't eclipse any other stars. And if you want to think "this is so unlikely what are the odds of this happening" -- well how many stars are there in the sky? We're focusing

        • Since the object could be tiny (it only has to hide a point of light after all) and very far away, it wouldn't eclipse any other stars.

          This doesn't sound right. If the object is close to the star in question, then it would need to be at least close in scale to the star in order to block out the star's light -- and even if it is, it would have to stay very precisely positioned to continue eclipsing the star for a long period of time. If there's an object that's blocking out the visibility of the star, it seems that it's almost certainly got to be really big.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DavenH ( 1065780 )
      My reading of "directly collapse" suggests they didn't consider the possibility of a wandering black hole swallowing them either.

      • My reading of "directly collapse" suggests they didn't consider the possibility of a wandering black hole swallowing them either.

        That would actually make it brighter for a lot longer than 3 years, and put out a ton of x-rays and gamma-rays in the process.

  • No known method to disappear a star (Score:5, Interesting)

    by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @03:28AM (#59535910)
    But plenty of known methods for a white dot to appear on an old photography plate. Better have multiple old photos of your missing star to make sure it was ever there in the first place.
    • Sure, you can dyson-sphere it. That was my first thought. Or just cover this side of it with solar collectors.

      • Occam's Razor. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fazig ( 2909523 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @05:40AM (#59536268)
        Yeah, sure. That's what you get when you raise a generation of would be scientists on popular science fiction.

        Working professionally with different kinds of sensor technologies my first and educated thought was: The first time around it might have been some kind of measurement error or artifact. These things happen.

        Although I have to be honest and just admit that I lack the information to make that determination. For example I'd like to know how often did they measure the presence of that star? Multiple data points with some time apart would be good evidence for it not just being an artifact in the first place.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by J-1000 ( 869558 )

          For example I'd like to know how often did they measure the presence of that star? Multiple data points with some time apart would be good evidence for it not just being an artifact in the first place.

          Also, did they see the star from more than one observatory?

      • Re:No known method to disappear a star (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SandorZoo ( 2318398 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @06:45AM (#59536362)

        There's also the similar Shkadov thruster [wikipedia.org]. If we can't see the star at all, then the thuster is pointing directly away from Earth, so the star's accelerating right at us!

      • A Dyson Sphere would still be detectable by its irradiated heat unless they also have thermodynamics breaking science.

        • Presumably a cloud that had moved in the way would have some increased heat vs. blank space, it having been irradiated by said star for uncounted eons.

    • I think this is the most likely explanation, unless the star's existence can be confirmed with other photographs as you mentioned. If it really was there, I think something like an occluding dust cloud would be substantially more likely than disappearance by artificial means.

    • Not on negatives (Score:5, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @05:29AM (#59536228)
      The old photos are taken on negative glass plates (glass because you needed to be able to make precise measurements on distances on it, so it needed to be rigid rather than flexible). On a negative, dark areas have the emulsion washed away. Stars are recorded as the original emulsion still being present. So no you couldn't scratch the plate to create a white dot - a scratch would actually turn white areas dark. A round speck of dirt would appear white like a star, but it's trivial to distinguish such a contaminant from the emulsion on the original plate..

      There was also a lot of work done on automatic dust/dirt removal from scanned negatives back during the transition from film to digital. The most common method [wikipedia.org] scans the photo in both visible light and IR. Most photo emulsions are transparent to IR, so the negative ends up being perfectly clear except for dirt and dust. Software then correlations the position of these specks in the IR image, and deletes them from the visible light image.

      I'm not sure why this story was considered noteworthy. More than likely it wasn't actually a star, but rather an asteroid or object in the Oort cloud like Pluto or Sedna. And all that's happened is that it's moved in its orbit around the sun. The method for finding planetoids back in the day was with a blink comparator [wikipedia.org]. You take two photos of the same spot in the sky at different times, and the comparator alternately flashes one or the other photo with the same registration. Stars appear to remain stationary, while the object appears to jump or "blink" from one spot to another. Unfortunately, this depends on your eyes to notice a dot appearing/disappearing among hundreds or thousands of other dots (which granted is pretty easy, but it's still possible to miss a dot). And the sky is huge so large portions never got more than one photo of it taken.

      Or another possibility is that it's just dust. It's well known that interstellar dust clouds can block the light from stars [bbc.com]. So the star or the dust cloud could have moved enough that the star's light is now obscured from our sight.

      • Chemical bubble/impurity during plate processing?

        When I worked in the slide industry (positive transparency film: dark=dark), we couldn't ever completely get rid of dark dots in blue skies. We took to calling them "birds". One of the nice parts of the move to digital is that this is no longer a problem (if you keep your sensor clean).

        With literally billions of stars in the sky, confusion of a plate defect with a star has to be happening often, on the numbers alone.

      • Just to nitpick: areas of the negative exposed to light break down a silver halide into silver. The development process turns adjacent silver halide molecules into silver, resulting in dark clumps of silver large enough to be visible. The fixing process, using a chemical like sodium thiosulphate, dissolves the silver halide so that it is washed away. The (misnamed) emulsion is actually a gelatin with dispersed light-sensitive silver halide particles. The gelatin remains after processing. Usually the fixing

  • Third Law of Astrophysics (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sique ( 173459 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @03:40AM (#59535942) Homepage
    There is the Third Law of Astrophysics: It's never aliens.

    • There is the Third Law of Astrophysics: It's never aliens.

      We're aliens. If we take the earth and think of it as a universe unto itself, aka all the life we know exists on our planet but have never discovered thus far, why wouldn't we think the same thing exists at the size of a universe? It seems backwards to think that life is unique given the size of the universe.

      • Earthlings *rolls eyes*. Am I right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        This isn't about just "life".
        There's quite a number of educated people who believe that there must be other life out there in the vast universe. Simple life like micro-organisms are plausible since there are so many different ones on our own planet already.

        This here is about technologically highly advanced life.
        Of course most of us will know Clarke's 3rd law that states "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But we have to keep in mind that this could be said about anyt

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          I've always preferred the corollary, "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sique ( 173459 )
        Don't confuse two different concepts:
        • Life is possible, given the right conditions, thus it probably exists at many different places.
        • A not yet seen phenomenon must have been caused by foreign intelligences.

        While I strongly agree with the first one, the second is contradictional to the "It's never aliens" paradigma. If we stop trying to figure out the causes for something we see, then we are just back to the ineffable will of $DEITY state of science, e.g. no science at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        No, we're human. We fit 100% in our anthropic frame of reference - we are here because we are here. It's everyone else who doesn't fit, and therefore is alien.

    • Saving the day with unscientific rigid belief mantras that comfort our irrational fear of the unusual!

      What would we do without Unscience Man?!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sique ( 173459 )
        Referring to a not yet satisfactorily explained phenomenom as "it was aliens" is on the same scientific level as "it was the ineffable will of $DEITY".

        And on a certain level, it is of not so much interest to astrophysicists, if it really was aliens. It's much more interesting to find out how they did it. And this can be looked at without referring to aliens at all, as they have to obey the same physical realities as we do. Which physical effects were causing the stars to dissappear (if they were really vi

    • Explains how it's never aliens and it's always aliens can both be true at the same time.

  • There's patches in the sky...
    • Remember: you're riding the Narcolounger at your own risk, with the knowledge that if you die in your dream then real death will result.

      What a weird-ass series that was...

  • Not so sure if we should be looking at those missing planets when risking the chance to be detected.

  • That first link... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @04:24AM (#59536078)
    Proves that on slashdot not even the editors read the articles...

    Seriously - "Last chance holiday deals: Echo Show 5, Nintendo Switch, iPad, Bose headphones and more"????
    https://www.cnet.com/news/last... [cnet.com]
    That link is not a news article about missing stars...
  • First is was dark matter, then dark energy. Now we have dark thieves stealing whole stars.

  • Dense paper, but at least the original PDF of the entire paper is easily available for examination. Does it claim to have found one single candidate missing object? Is this remarkable out of a large number of data points? Would this paper be a good starting point for teaching students Data Munging?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      You note that there's a link to the paper, then ask a bunch of questions indicating you clearly didn't read it?

  • The only way it can happen is if it black-holed itself, therefore it must be aliens. Did I miss the sequitur there?

    How do we know what it didnt black hole itself? I mean, have we checked for X-rays? Would we even be able to detect it? FFS point Chandra or Compton at it or something.

  • Thanks for "editing," Beau.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/miss... [cnet.com]

  • No other known process. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Forty Two Tenfold ( 1134125 ) on Thursday December 19, 2019 @06:39AM (#59536346)
    Well, a nova [wikipedia.org] is the first example that they are wrong.

    • Since that leaves behind a nebula for light to shine on. And usually a smaller star too.

      • You didn't look at what I linked did you.

        I'm not talking about supernova. I'm talking about a novae, that were visible when the photos were taken but are now too dim.

        But a supernova is also a plausible explanation if it lights up a distant galaxy, otherwise invisible. Good luck finding a blast nebula at that distance.

        A supernova close enough to leave a visible nebula would be too bright to be mistaken for a normal star in those photos.

  • Look for them in the infrared. They'll be there.

  • It is by far the simplest answer: There could simply be a cloud of matter in front of it! Matter that we can't see because it doesn't shine. Or even a black hole that wraps the light coming from it around itself.

    Sure, that does NOT mean it must be right. Occam's Razor is bullshit. But it means it makes sense to test that hypothesis FIRST. (Aka the modified/fixed Occam's Razor.)

  • The star eaters are coming for us! Run!

  • We've never seen any real evidence of Dyson-Spheres. We can all see that old photographs are riddled with noise. Occam's Razor strongly suggests photography faults are a far more likely explanation than Dyson Spheres.

    If a Dyson-Sphere causes a star to go dark in the visible spectrum it would still be detectable through radiated heat, unless they have thermodynamics breaking science.

    With that many stars are going dark in a hundred years then the night sky would be black after the 4 Billion years of life on E

  • "We don't have a model by which XYZ could happen, so there's increased likelihood of intelligence being involved."

  • Funny, i wanted to read the articles... but the first one is just an ad xd

  • Has anybody read Pandora's Star? If you haven't you should. It's relevant.

  • The left over pecan pie from Thanksgiving dinner that was left in the fridge is missing. It could mean some ghosts came in the middle of the night and ate it.

    It could, thats all I am saying. I didn't say they did. But they could have.

  • They sent a huge battleship to meet us. Since it's travelling straight toward us, it's blocking their sun.

  • If these "alien civilizations" can wipe out starts, we should probably consider not trying to contact them right now.

  • Constructing one Dyson sphere in only 100 years would be fantastic enough, but constructing 100 Dyson spheres in 100 years means about 1 per year. That wouldnâ(TM)t necessarily mean that it takes these civilizations only one year to build one, simply that they have enough construction in progress to average substantial completion of one sphere per year. This is still an implausible rate of construction; it implies that there are either a very great number of K2 civilizations in our galaxy, or a single

  • But isn't there some alternative other than "it just collapsing into a black hole"?

    If you have a small start and a planet crashes into it couldn't that disperse it's fuel enough to extinguish the star. akin to scattering a burning piece of paper.

    Couldn't it burn up it's fuel supply? akin to a candle burning out.

    Couldn't something impact the star that would render it's fuel inert? akin to dousing a flame with a fire extinguisher.

    I'm aware that a star is a much larger scale than a simple flame, but things

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