In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished–astronomers still can't find them | Hacker News Reader

In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished–astronomers still can't find them

phys.org

43 pointspavel_lishin12 comments

> A third idea is that they weren't objects at all. Palomar Observatory isn't too far from the New Mexico deserts where nuclear weapons testing occurred. Radioactive dust from the tests could have contaminated the photographic plates, creating bright spots on some images and not others. Given similar vanishings seen on other photographic plates of the 1950s, this seems quite possible.

They really buried the "duh" in the article, after random people like me, who know nothing about astronomy, were entertaining ideas more like a Dyson sphere.

Well the first paragraph of the article clearly states they disappeared somewhere within a 1 hour window, so a Dyson sphere being constructed in less than 1 hour isn't really a possibility.

> a Dyson sphere being constructed in less than 1 hour isn't really a possibility.

Sounds like someone needs to switch to fixed-price contracting for the Final Positioning and Assembly part of the job. Cost-plus for large but routine astrostructural projects is just begging for foot-draggers, expense-padders, and goldbrickers.

Theoretically, the entire sphere does not need to be constructed in an hour. They just need to put in place the piece that blocks the light we see. Depending on how far away the star is, the speed of placing this block in place could be doable (at least within the context of a society sufficiently advanced to build a Dyson sphere in the first place)

Saturns rings?

I guess "extra 'stars' on 1950s astronomy-related photographic plates probably just radioactive pollution" wouldn't get clicks.

> Given the timespan of about 50 minutes, causality and the speed of light would require they were no more than 6 AU apart.

Well, not if it was pre-planned...

(The radiation theory does seem a lot more plausible, tho.)

So much open questions.

Are these stars visible in any earlier plates? Even as a smudge?

If it's only in one plate, couldn't it have been a meteor?

I wonder if this was one of the inspirations for "A Wind in the Door", which mentions stars disappearing.

previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38037284

I’m just going to say it:

What if something very big ate them!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com