Over 700 Stars Mysteriously Vanished In The Last 70 Years, But Why?

our night skies change all the time some stars become brighter some stars become dimmer and some stars slowly move across the night skies but by looking at the night skies long enough we can also start discovering some other mysteries one such mystery is what the scientists refer to as vanishing stars stars that kind of just disappear hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to reflect back on this idea of vanishing stars that have first mentioned approximately two years ago because since then the researchers behind this particular study have also discovered a lot more of these unusual vanishing stars stars that for one reason or another seem to have completely disappeared in the last few decades and although initially the scientists discovered only 100 of these stars with the help of the citizen science project known as the vasco network the network that you can learn more about from this paper right here and that you can also join yourself they now have identified approximately 800 of these unusual objects or technically they're not there anymore so i guess missing objects with many such disappearances currently not having any good explanation at all it's as if something either covered the star or if it just shut down its activity and became something entirely different and so in this video we're going to discuss some of the potential explanations and i'm also going to show you where you can join the citizen project yourself if you want to participate in it as well the project that several scientists discussed during this seti talk right here mostly because this also represents one of the most exciting projects in regards to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence naturally because one of the potential explanations here is that this could be some sort of a mega structure just hiding the star itself but that's of course not the only and not even the best explanation so far the best explanations are still natural explanations so what exactly is going on here well naturally we know that stars can disappear for many different reasons for example a supernova but during typical supernova you would also expect a lot of other emissions but also possibly some sort of leftover some sort of a nebular cloud that should be detectable afterwards yet as of now as of today none of these objects investigated in the study here had anything left behind there with no extra emissions there was no additional radiation it's as if the objects just sort of vanished okay well what can possibly do this so let's start right here where do these pictures actually come from well the original pictures the original images were taken by the us navy the united states naval observatory to be more exact and this was done several decades ago back in the late 40s in the early 50s in case you were not aware the us navy uses what's known as astrometry for extremely precise navigation reasons and so us navy has some of the most advanced capabilities when it comes to observing the stars and taking various pictures of various objects and so over the years they've taken a lot of pictures of various stars but a few decades later several other surveys started to take more pictures with one such observatory being pan stars now these are obviously not done for military reasons this was mostly done for research reasons and you can actually even access all of this data yourself because all of this is publicly available and so the scientists behind this study wanted to figure out well has our night skies changed dramatically they wanted to see if any of the objects possibly appeared or disappeared this could be obviously for many different reasons and could be explained in a lot of different natural ways but to their surprise it didn't take them long to start discovering a lot of these vanishing objects stars or some bright objects that were there in the 50s but were not there in 2000s approximately five decades later with the total number of observed and detected objects increasing more and more as more people join their project and help them discover even more of these vanishing stars although okay let's do a bit of a correction here i call them stars but it's not necessarily as a role we don't actually know what was seen by the navy back in the 50s obviously they could be stars but they could also have been various types of trainees various types of bright sudden events that only stay bright for some time possibly a year or two years and then disappear completely now this could be obviously some sort of a supernova but a more likely explanation here would be just a regular nova essentially a thermonuclear reaction on the surface of some sort of white dwarf now these happen all the time and we actually detect them pretty much on weekly basis and these do produce very bright emissions that could have actually been captured back in the 50s and would not be present right now but the problem here is the number of these objects discovered so far it's very very unlikely that several hundred of these objects would be visible in the 50s and not visible today so nova by itself does not explain the origin of all of these objects maybe some of them but definitely not all of them now one way to prove if this is a nova is to actually possibly see these objects again a lot of nova happened many times many of them are recurrent nova so if suddenly one of these objects reappears again we'll know for a fact that this is exactly what happened here at the same time maybe this is just some sort of a really bright flare for example from an extremely active red dwarf we know that many red dwarfs including the nearby proxima centauri are actually very active they produce tons and tons of flares that temporarily increase their brightness and so this could be a potential explanation for some of these vanishing objects it's not that they're vanished it just at that particular time in the 50s they were much brighter than usual but once again the numbers here don't really add up the recent analysis identified over 800 of these objects already and having 800 flares happening at the same time does not explain all of these objects the other intriguing explanation here involves what's known as the collapser essentially when a somewhat massive red supergiant sort of skips the supernova part and collapses into the black hole directly which would cause the star to disappear completely for example one such collapser was detected in one of the galaxies nearby but normally there are at least some leftovers that we can hypothetically detect from these particular systems it could either be the emissions from the previous interaction with the gas in the star system or some other neuroscience that should still be detected even after 50 60 70 years and so one potential explanation here would be to double check these areas to see what other emissions we can detect so far this has not been done because the scientists only started doing this not so long ago at the same time this could be some sort of a variable star but the fact that variable stars generally return back to original brightness means that we should be able to see these stars again at the moment none of them seem to be visible also for a star to completely disappear it would have to be some really extreme version of a variable star so this right now is the least likely explanation okay how about some other unusual events other transients here the scientists speculate that maybe fast radial bursts or gamma ray bursts could be responsible for producing some of these unusual observations based on the mechanism that we don't really understand just yet since we know that gamma ray bursts and fast radio bursts do happen quite a lot in terms of numbers that could definitely be the case but because these transients usually happen extremely fast it's very difficult to explain why they would appear like stationary stars in these initial surveys so this is definitely not the best explanation either and so even though after the burst there might be some sort of an afterglow at the moment the scientists are not entirely sure if this is actually possible at all and so even though the most likely explanation is still some sort of a nova or supernova just the sheer numbers of the objects discovered so far really make this a somewhat difficult explanation to accept as a matter of fact most of the collapsers or any other similar supernova only happen approximately three times per century in a typical galaxy so discovering them in just a few years would be almost impossible and so at the moment there's no one good explanation for all of this and as i mentioned before after examining approximately 12 000 candidates they've officially identified approximately 800 of these objects and so what is it is it some sort of an alien civilization covering stars making them invisible is it some sort of a strange black hole phenomenon that we cannot currently explain or is it something entirely different well as i mentioned at the moment there's really almost no way to answer this they seem to be there they seem to be vanishing but at the moment we don't even know if it's all the same phenomenon or if it's actually completely different phenomena that seem to be visible in a similar way more importantly they're not even nearly done yet so they've examined 12 000 candidates but in total approximately 150 000 candidates were discovered in the initial report that means that less than 10 of candidates were examined so far so much more is to be done which also implies that many more such objects will probably be discovered in future studies but as i mentioned this is a citizen science project which means that you can also join if you'd like to participate so how do you join and what exactly do you need to do well the website the link is in the description below and just like with a lot of other citizen science projects this is basically a mini game you can check out the tutorial to find out how all this works and what exactly you have to do but in short you're given two pictures one on the left and one on the right and this is the old navy pictures this is the more recent pictures from various surveys and basically you're trying to find out if the object in the picture is still there or if the image is bad in some way and cannot be used if the object has moved or if it vanished or maybe something else happened entirely so in this particular case the object is definitely still there so some objects like this one right here are not going to be stars they're going to be galaxies these ones are relatively easy to identify and relatively easy to confirm that this is still there as well and that's basically kind of all you have to do now it's not a super fun game but it definitely helps the scientists to go through those 150 000 candidates but how do you know if the object truly disappeared well here after a few minutes of doing this i seem to have found one so notice this part right here and if we combine it with the other picture notice how it seems to be no longer there now it's possible that it moves somewhere but for all we know it's a vanishing object so i'm marking this as something that vanished and to be honest this is probably one of the most exciting projects right now investigating something that nobody has a good explanation for obviously it could be aliens but it could also be some really unusual phenomena we never considered something that might have an explanation in the next few years and because all of this only started a couple of years ago at the moment this is definitely one of the most exciting astronomical projects out there something that i'm pretty sure we'll be talking more about in the next few years so since there's really no explanation and nothing else to mention here other than maybe participate in this project there's really nothing else i can add it's a really intriguing mystery probably one of the biggest mysteries out there but a really intriguing discovery that i'm sure a lot of scientists will be talking about in the next 10 or so years and so once we have some answers or maybe some other updates i'll make sure to follow this up with another video until then check out all the relevant links in the description below subscribe if you used to have and share this with someone who was learning about space and sciences and maybe come back tomorrow to learn something else maybe support this show on patreon by joining channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful i'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 567,013

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, astrometry, vasco network, vanishing stars, disappearing stars, stars that are no longer there, seti, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, why do stars disappear, how do stars disappear, megastructures, us navy, usno, panstars, how our night skies changed, dyson spheres, dyson sphere, invisible stars

Id: X3xddkS4H80

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021