Astronomy

Pixels burned out, it happens

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

As Universe Today flagged in a recent blog, a not-yet-peer-reviewed study by an international group of researchers has offered new potential explanations to the 1952 mystery, when astronomers at Caltech's Palomar Observatory found the bizarre and still-unexplained astral anomaly.

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.

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.

The other options — that they were the result of some strange sign of something closer to Earth, like the hypothesized comet-producing Oort Cloud region of our Solar System in space, or that they could have been specs of radioactive dust from the nearby nuclear test sites in New Mexico during that decade — seem somewhat more likely, though when it comes to those bizarre things humans capture on their sensitive stargazing instruments, stranger things certainly have happened.

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