Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say (cnet.com) 289
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."
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."
There is no known physical process? (Score:2)
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)
And three years later this object is STILL perfectly in the way of being able to see the star from our point in space?
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You're meant to jump straight to it being a Dyson Sphere...
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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.
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Well, Disney did actually chew up a few stars for The Force Awakens after all, apparently.
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Well, I wouldn't exactly call the actors it stars.
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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
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If it's a Dyson sphere it would be fairly easy to identify from its infrared radiation. As mentioned in the linked paper.
It it not a diny dot! (Score:2)
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.
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Shouldn't it be radiating a low heat above the background temp?
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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.
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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)
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Occam's Razor. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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?
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Thank you. To get around the singleton error artifact, they would need it to appear from at least two photographs.
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When I tried to build my Dyson Sphere I didn't get all parts from IKEA and when I still tried to put it together it wouldn't work. But probably yours did?
Sarcasm aside, it didn't sound like you were joking there, and my point is that a Dyson Sphere is still purely hypothetical. We don't know a single example outside of science fiction.
And there are many. For example not long ago I read Peter F. Hamilton's novels Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. Decent writing, in my opinion.
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The same could be said to you. He admitted a mistake and apologized whereas you...
Re:No known method to disappear a star (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
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A Dyson Sphere would still be detectable by its irradiated heat unless they also have thermodynamics breaking science.
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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.
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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.
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It would still be visible in infrared, or if it was so dense that not even IR got through it the cloud would be noticeable all by itself.
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Not on negatives (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Not on negatives (Score:2)
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.
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Third Law of Astrophysics (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Vogans (Score:2)
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Oh, dear, today is thursday...
Re:Vogans (Score:5, Insightful)
Could never get the hang of Thursdays...
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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
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I've always preferred the corollary, "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
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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.
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given that we have no way of reproducing it in a lab
Yet. We've reproduced big chunks of the method for abiogenesis already in the lab and encountered other answers in the wild. Considering that we've been at the experiment for less than a century I think the outlook for finding the method that created life is rather optimistic.
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Put on your tin foil hat, it's Unscience Man! (Score:2)
Saving the day with unscientific rigid belief mantras that comfort our irrational fear of the unusual!
What would we do without Unscience Man?!
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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
Fourth Law of Astrophysics (Score:2)
Explains how it's never aliens and it's always aliens can both be true at the same time.
Mantrid (Score:2)
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What a weird-ass series that was...
The First Order testing their Death Star (Score:2)
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)
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...
Great, now we have to re-learn astronomy again (Score:2)
One missing object? (Score:2)
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?
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You note that there's a link to the paper, then ask a bunch of questions indicating you clearly didn't read it?
What? (Score:2)
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.
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How do we know what it didnt black hole itself?
Size and age of the star.
Actual CNET link (Score:2)
Thanks for "editing," Beau.
https://www.cnet.com/news/miss... [cnet.com]
No other known process. (Score:4, Informative)
Not really. (Score:2)
Since that leaves behind a nebula for light to shine on. And usually a smaller star too.
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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.
Infrared (Score:2)
Look for them in the infrared. They'll be there.
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Brilliant! I bet they never thought of that!
twit.
Sure there is a process!! Obstruction! (Score:2)
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.)
Run! (Score:2)
Science clickbait? (Score:2)
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
seems like the Intelligent Design argument (Score:2)
"We don't have a model by which XYZ could happen, so there's increased likelihood of intelligence being involved."
First link is an ad (Score:2)
Funny, i wanted to read the articles... but the first one is just an ad xd
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Pandora's Star (Score:2)
Has anybody read Pandora's Star? If you haven't you should. It's relevant.
Missing pecan pie could point to ghosts. (Score:2)
It could, thats all I am saying. I didn't say they did. But they could have.
It's pretty obvious (Score:2)
They sent a huge battleship to meet us. Since it's travelling straight toward us, it's blocking their sun.
Alternative for those willing to believe aliens. (Score:2)
Maybe we should leave them alone? (Score:2)
If these "alien civilizations" can wipe out starts, we should probably consider not trying to contact them right now.
100 Dyson spheres in 100 years!? (Score:2)
off left field (Score:2)
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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Re:Unless it's a dark forest phenomena (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something worse than religion? [shudder]
Re:Unless it's a dark forest phenomena (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unless it's a dark forest phenomena (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe Galactus ate them,and the Silver Surfer is leading him here...
I'm actually hoping that Dyson Spheres are all the rage
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It might just be a dust cloud passing in between us and the star, no?
Discovering dust clouds numerous enough to occult that many stars would be an interesting finding in its own right. It might explain some of our own primordial climate events.
Re:Unless it's a dark forest phenomena (Score:5, Insightful)
100 stars is not many stars considering there are around 2.5 million cataloged stars.
But the linked abstract doesn't consider dust clouds as most likely, as it's more likely that the star was just much brighter for a brief period of time: "We find about 100 point sources visible in only one epoch in the red band of the USNO, which may be of interest in searches for strong M-dwarf flares, high-redshift supernovae, or other categories of unidentified red transients." Of course the paper makes no mention of aliens, that's some writer trying to earn money with clickbait.
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I'm thinking you have a mistaken idea of what the "dark forest" scenario means. It has nothing to do with the tech levels of other species, only the tech level it takes to make unstoppable relativistic weapons. The scenario can be stated like so "We're all standing in a dark forest, with lethal guns. If you fire your gun, the others can see you. You know nothing about the other participants. Your goal is not to be killed." https://bigthink.com/scotty-he... [bigthink.com]
All it takes for the dark forest scenario to make se
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No, the dark forest hypothesis isn't about future competition for resources, it is about answering the question, "Why haven't we seen any aliens?" The answer it provides is, "Because we don't know who might be trying to kill us." Why would they try to kill us? Because relativistic weapons are easy to make and use, but very, very hard to detect or stop. We could launch relativistic weapons with today's technology. If some, slightly more advanced race became aware of us, the most rational, survival oriented c
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No, this is not what the concept is about. It is about answering the question, "Why haven't we seen any aliens?" It has nothing to do with ease of communication. Just with how easy it is to create relativistic weapons. We could do it today if we felt like it and had a target.
Communicating with them gives away our position. If they are hostile, we've just signed our death warrant. And why wouldn't they be? They don't know us, in fact, the only thing they know is that with our current technology, we could des
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todays digital photos don't have this problem.
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That's perfectly understandable. Welcome to the world of clickbait. Well, and some good stuff.
Yes, they may not have! (Score:5, Insightful)
You have never been an expert at anything, have you?
Yes, the more you are an expert, the blinder you get for those very basic common sense answers. Been there myself, more than once.
That is why you always should have a seven year old on your team, to point those things out. Or a Slashdotter.
So your argument, while a popular meme with the clueless masses, is actually stupidly wrong.
Unless they specifically mention dust clouds, assume they didn't think of them yet.
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Astronomers are well aware it's probably not aliens. They're also quite familiar with dust clouds. They rarely need Slashdotters to suggest such things.
The paper is linked in the summary. Read it?
Re:Yes, they may not have! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Unless they specifically mention dust clouds, assume they didn't think of them yet."
Wait, unless the science journalist mentions something, it wasn't in the paper? Do you understand how science journalism works, and what science journalists get paid for?
I can't believe I have to even ask this, but you DO understand that it's not the scientists writing these articles, right?
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We already know why...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
My god, you're right!
And I thought it was just Fry writing a love note to Leela - Futurama Season 3 Episode 14 Time Keeps On Slippin' https://www.thewatchcartoononline.tv/futurama-season-3-episode-14-time-keeps-on-slippin [thewatchcartoononline.tv]
Missing LINKs (Score:3)
Ok missing stars is interesting. What is more interesting is the first link in the Slashdot post points to a CNET page hawking Christmas gifts. FOR REAL?
How can we read about missing stars when the link itself is missing?
Do the Slashdot editors even read their posts these days? What if that link had led to a malware site?
I realize they get a bunch of submissions around the same topic but just publishing an article because it includes a few "helpful" link they completely fail to vet is atrocious.
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We show that these [missing stars in new dataset] are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects.
So it's not a stretch to believe that these stars were in the latter stages of their lifecycle, went nova, weren't big enough to create a big gas cloud and flash of light, and are now stellar-mass black holes. Mystery solved.
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The Prime Directive isn't a real thing, keep in mind. It's not a value. It's a backwards explanation to explain why, even though the galaxy is choked with ancient civilizations, nobody ever visited Earth (openly anyway.)
Rather than let feral worlds fester in misery and death and war, you could ride in and uplift their civilizations. Objections would be made locally by politicians losing power, but not from the people.
If you really wanted to be mild, just set up shop on the outskirts and let people volunt
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Gravitational lensing isn't like an optic lens. The result is highly distorted and would not have looked like a plain-old star in the old images. (The distortions are predictable so you can undo them to "see" the distant object)