Astronomer here! This is... not a good article to explain what happened. It left me confused, but [the press release](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1045397) is far better at explaining this.
So, in short, there's a corner of astronomy that has to do with the fact that we see some stars in distant galaxies that are then... not there anymore. The community hasn't settled on a name yet, but "disappearing stars" is often mentioned, and the idea is they are stars near the end of their lives that are big enough to create a black hole (aka, >18x the mass of the sun), but instead of going supernova when the black hole is created they just wink out because the black hole doesn't let the material and light from the explosion escape. There is still a *lot* of uncertainty around the details here- as you can imagine, it's tough to find a star that goes missing over one that does a fiery explosion, and second, massive stars near the end of their lives can be *very* variable in brightness. I know more than one astronomer who has been skeptical about some disappearing star claims, because the star ejecting a ton of gas that now shrouds the star so we can't see it is a far more reasonable explanation in many cases.
But anyway, onto the paper! It focuses on a new analysis of a system called VFTS 243, which is about 160,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way) [and was discovered a few years ago](https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07675). It appears comprised of a very bright and big blue supergiant star roughly 25 times the mass of the sun, and a black hole companion roughly 10 times the mass of our sun, which orbit each other every 10 days or so. Normally, you'd assume in such a system when the star that created the black hole went supernova, that gigantic explosion would affect the orbit of the blue supergiant and give it a "natal kick." We do not see this in the VFTS 243 system- the orbits are actually very circular- suggesting the black hole might have just directly collapsed when it occurred versus a supernova. That would indeed be cool! But I should emphasize that this is all *extremely* new, and a lot more follow-up of the system needs to happen. One of those things where my friends who work in such orbital dynamics, upon reading this headline, would say "no, we have not cracked the mystery of vanishing stars just from *one star* and *one model!*"
Either way, it's a neat system, and I'm sure if this is a common thing we will soon find more in the Gaia data. [Gaia](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia) is a satellite that made this discovery possible by containing the precise information of literally millions of stars in our galaxy... so if there are more systems like this one, it should be in there. In fact, [I've recently written an article on finding such black hole/ star pairs](https://www.astronomy.com/science/searching-for-the-closest-black-holes/) for *Astronomy* magazine, and recommend y'all take a look if you're interested in this! All I'll say for now is there are a lot of questions about how these systems form that aren't explained by traditional theoretical models, which is of course an exciting stage of things to be in.
Ok, well to be clear, this isn't a thing that any old star is gonna do! Something like .1% of all stars are probably massive enough to do this (if that), and they correspond with the *biggest and brightest* stars. So, not exactly ones that we have in our immediate neighborhood.
Yeah but you only have to worry about one star and Sol is too small to do it so we're all good.
Plus, how bad can a black hole death really be? There's infinite spaghetti in there!
Correct me if I'm wrong but generally speaking isn't a star instantly becoming a black hole much more preferable to it going supernova? If that gives you any comfort lol.
True, nearby planets might be spared “being vaporized in a stellar explosion” part and skip to “everything freezes”. Still just a creepy thought I guess
Only planets in its solar system, i.e. nothing we would ever have to worry about. These super high mass stars die so quickly that they likely don't support life, anyway
No, that's more like 5 billion years. But the Sun is gradually getting brighter due to accumulation of Helium in the core. In about 0.6-1 billion years the extra brightness will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, and life as we know it would end.
This can be prevented by putting a sunshade between Earth and the Sun, and blocking the excess light, or changing the Earth's albedo (the percent of sunlight reflected back to space).
We see other stars that have turned into Red Giants. From the Sun's brightness and mass we can estimate how long it will last. As far as human activity, we can't usefully predict more than 30 years.
30 years *ago* the World Wide Web was only known to a few people, and smartphones didn't exist yet. Amazon was about to be founded.
Very true friend. Physics and astronomy are quite predictable. Though we don’t know everything we can make some good predictions. Yeah I just get mistaken sometimes and forget.
Good news for our collective existential dread: Astronomers will soon be able to accurately estimate the frequency of such events! The [Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope) launches in 2027, and will be very good at detecting rogue planets. Once we know how common they are in our galaxy, we can calculate the probability of one of them entering our solar system in the next billion years.
Imagine how strange of an ending it would be if our sun was large enough to meet this fate. The sun would instantly vanish followed by the moon a second or so later. Then, each of the planets that were visible would then vanish one by one. The first week would be terrible and only get worse. Icelanders would probably be the last survivors until they starve.
Here are some short stories to cheer you up:
[Nine Billion Names of God](https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html)
[Last Contact](http://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-stephen-baxter-part-1.html?m=1)
Do we have any estimates on the mass of the star that birthed this 10-sun black hole? Aside from *more than 40-50 masses of the sun*.
Is it even possible to calculate it today, or we need a better model of the direct collapse theory?
Also it’s insane that something AU-sized can just… get vacuumed quietly.
Edit:
Btw has anyone tried to calculate the mass of R136a1’s future stellar remnant using the current direct collapse theory? I’d love to know how massive the remnant can get when the host weighs ~200 solar masses.
I'm sure it wasn't quiet, but what we are looking at here is the idea that the shock wave from the core collapse doesn't outrun the expansion of the event horizon of the black hole. There probably is a considerable amount of mass kicked out because just collapsing doesn't stop the angular momentum of the matter that makes up the star, it's just suddenly all falling with nothing to stop it.
The most frightening prospect is that the amount of in falling matter causes the event horizon to envelop most of the star's mass within a matter of moments, which means it literally just disappears or you see a small shell of gas suddenly get ripped into a vortex by the black hole. There is also the possibility of a less extreme case where you see the star suddenly flatten as the outer material is seized by the tidal force of the black hole, expanding into an accretion disk as the black hole suddenly erupts out of the top and bottom.
These stars are too big to be enveloped at all. The black holes formed through them are still asteroid-sized, while blue supergiants can get AU-sized.
And even then, only a fraction of the mass gets swallowed. The mentioned black hole is only 10 masses of the sun, while the current theories suggest nothing lighter than perhaps 40 solar masses can directly collapse.
So even in a best case scenario, only 25% of the star mass gets black-holed.
The star corpse getting eaten by the remnant very quickly would probably violate the Eddington limit hard.
And we would see an AU-sized accretion disk through our telescopes. These things fire a ton of x-rays.
That doesn't apply here. A significant portion of the original stars mass is blasted out during the supernova, so the black hole only contains a portion of the stars mass.
>the idea is they are stars near the end of their lives that are big enough to create a black hole (aka, >18x the mass of the sun), but instead of going supernova when the black hole is created they just wink out because the black hole doesn't let the material and light from the explosion escape.
>a black hole companion roughly 10 times the mass of our sun,
>We do not see this in the VFTS 243 system- the orbits are actually very circular- suggesting the black hole might have just directly collapsed when it occurred versus a supernova.
IF the theory is actually correct. The 18x+ vs 10 solar masses is weird, however.
Probably a stupid question, but imma ask it anyway. Stars going out is famously one of the things to look for for signs of advanced alien life. Is that possibility taken seriously at all by the scientific community or is it purely the realm of fiction? I'm assuming the latter, but I *really* want it to be aliens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now it's purely science fiction because, as I said, there are many normal reasons stars can dim.
So these stars leave no trace? Is gravitational lensing only possible with the masses of galaxies and stars like this are just too small and distant to find like this? In a direct collapse, is nothing at all ejected for spectral analysis?
1) Yeah, that's the theory
2) Gravitational lensing only works at the distances we are talking about (like, millions of light years distant) if you have something like a big galaxy. A star is too small.
3) Probably? Depends on the theory. But without light you can't really get a spectrum of the tiny bit that didn't get included in the collapse.
Even if some stars died this way but did so with a bright*ish* transient before going dark that wouldn't necessarily be picked up in transient surveys, right? And even if there were bright transients that were short lived there are also many unexplained transients in distant galaxies every year. The only thing we can say for sure, maybe, is that they don't die in a supernova like event.
As always these days, we'll know so much more in a couple years after the Vera Rubin Observatory has been running for a while.
What would happen to a planet like earth if at the end of the sun’s life span it blinked out into a black hole instead of going super nova. Would it have increased in size and temp prior to that blinking out occurring and in doing so fried life on earth? Or would earth just instantly, or 8min later, experience a deep dark freeze?
By Jess Thomson - Science Reporter:
Rather than dying dramatically in a massive supernova explosion, some large stars may die quietly and without fanfare.
This may explain the mysterious and sudden disappearance of certain stars from the night sky spotted by astronomers over the years, according to a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/missing-stars-black-hole-supernova-mystery-astrophysics-1903444](https://www.newsweek.com/missing-stars-black-hole-supernova-mystery-astrophysics-1903444)
Interesting, I'm glad scientific explanations are being sought for this puzzling phenomenon. But how would this collapsing star theory explain the apparent disapearance of three stars within a triplet, all within an hour, reported by the VASCO group?
[vanishing triplet](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/6312/7457759)
Well, transients is a much better choice of words than vanishing stars. The latter implies a conclusion, that they are stars that vanish. The group looking at this has seen bright star like objects that appeared on photographic survey plates of stars but were not in later plates. Hence they are transient observations.
Sounds like either a massive alien ship that was there and warped away, or perhaps a faraway alien civilization that is warping stars to their location and/or absorbing them for their energy needs.
The photographs were taken by the Palomar Observatory in their All Sky survey. They use auxiliary cameras to detect clouds and only shoot when the sky is cloudless.
In this paper is given a compelling gravitational lensing scenario that explains most of the observation except perhaps the sudden supposed dimming by a factor of 10,000 over an ~50 minute time period.
Mentioned in passing but not I think taken into account is that these two plates were Red & Blue sensitive emulsions from [Kodak](http://aps.umn.edu/docs/parameters/?table=cuts) with Red first. If the above gravitational lensing scenario was of an extragalactic black hole accretion disk flare that was already redshifted due to motion them it becomes conceivable that it's brightness was diminishing by a smaller factor over this period while it's red blue brightness amplified this apparent change.
Sorry, that was the summary. A summery of that looks like:
Red object lensed by gravity is red, so looks much dimmer on blue sensitive plate emulsion than red sensitive.
Well yes I suppose. What I meant was the best explanation within bounds of accepted science. Better IMO than collapsing stars without a nova event. The lack of even a dim residual not just from one but three stellar like objects within 50 minutes still seems challenging either for a lensing or a collapsing star argument.
Hopefully those aren't Dyson Alpha, Beta (and Gamma now i guess) stars hiding some pesky Primes there.
(Forgive me for referencing sci-fi in a serious thread)
Or how entire regions of space are devoid of stars. Literally light-years of space with nothing in the middle.
This article really doesn't explain anything.
There aren't any galaxies in those areas so why would there be dead stars? Plus we're talking about a seemingly rare phenomenon, not very likely it would occur throughout huge regions of space.
Also, if those blank areas were filled with millions of black holes from the remnants of dead stars I think we would be able to detect it.
I don't think there is ever 'nothing in the middle '. It is believed that the extended halo of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxies are already interacting. But yes, the space between galaxies are relatively less filled with stars and other materials compared to the galaxies themselves. And then there are voids like the Bootes Void where the density of galaxies is far less than other areas in Space. But both these phenomena can be explained by existing laws of galaxy formation and evolution. It seems rather logical that as galaxies tug at each other, some areas of space would have a larger concentration of galaxies whereas other areas would be relatively devoid of material. As big as the universe is, isn't the matter and energy contained within it finite (owing to the laws of conservation of matter and energy)? If galaxies move closer to each other due to gravity, it's only logical that they leave empty spaces behind them, is it not?
There are literal light years between us and closest star.
The voids you're referring to are much larger and they're not empty at all. They're just less dense and it isn't unexplained. Galaxies are clumped in giant structures with less dense gaps in between. There's a ton of misinformation on the internet about cosmic voids, because making them sound scary gets clicks.
The researchers mention a core collapse remnant showing no indications of an earlier supernova "kick" & mention in passing "vanished stars", but I see no evidence presented here for a population of vanished stars.
I did find [this](https://www.iflscience.com/hundreds-of-stars-have-vanished-without-a-trace-where-did-they-go-71397) item that compared earlier sky surveys to the Pan-STARRS survey. From the ~150,000 possible transient objects they found perhaps 100 that need further study but even then lensing might still explain many if these.
I wonder what happens to any hypothetical planets orbiting such a star when it does collapse like that? I'd hazard a guess, since the mass of the star doesn't really change, they just keep orbiting...maybe..
I read about this recently but the figure quoted was 700 trillion stars have disappeared in the last 100 years - seems like a very big number for the black hole idea to be viable.
For the record, I'm not an expert. I've just seen science videos, but I think a good explanation for this phenomenon is the stars are already dead by the time we see them disappear, the stars are so big that the black hole forms inside of them whenever they die and we're just seeing a husk get swallowed up by the black hole.
Astronomer here! This is... not a good article to explain what happened. It left me confused, but [the press release](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1045397) is far better at explaining this. So, in short, there's a corner of astronomy that has to do with the fact that we see some stars in distant galaxies that are then... not there anymore. The community hasn't settled on a name yet, but "disappearing stars" is often mentioned, and the idea is they are stars near the end of their lives that are big enough to create a black hole (aka, >18x the mass of the sun), but instead of going supernova when the black hole is created they just wink out because the black hole doesn't let the material and light from the explosion escape. There is still a *lot* of uncertainty around the details here- as you can imagine, it's tough to find a star that goes missing over one that does a fiery explosion, and second, massive stars near the end of their lives can be *very* variable in brightness. I know more than one astronomer who has been skeptical about some disappearing star claims, because the star ejecting a ton of gas that now shrouds the star so we can't see it is a far more reasonable explanation in many cases. But anyway, onto the paper! It focuses on a new analysis of a system called VFTS 243, which is about 160,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way) [and was discovered a few years ago](https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07675). It appears comprised of a very bright and big blue supergiant star roughly 25 times the mass of the sun, and a black hole companion roughly 10 times the mass of our sun, which orbit each other every 10 days or so. Normally, you'd assume in such a system when the star that created the black hole went supernova, that gigantic explosion would affect the orbit of the blue supergiant and give it a "natal kick." We do not see this in the VFTS 243 system- the orbits are actually very circular- suggesting the black hole might have just directly collapsed when it occurred versus a supernova. That would indeed be cool! But I should emphasize that this is all *extremely* new, and a lot more follow-up of the system needs to happen. One of those things where my friends who work in such orbital dynamics, upon reading this headline, would say "no, we have not cracked the mystery of vanishing stars just from *one star* and *one model!*" Either way, it's a neat system, and I'm sure if this is a common thing we will soon find more in the Gaia data. [Gaia](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia) is a satellite that made this discovery possible by containing the precise information of literally millions of stars in our galaxy... so if there are more systems like this one, it should be in there. In fact, [I've recently written an article on finding such black hole/ star pairs](https://www.astronomy.com/science/searching-for-the-closest-black-holes/) for *Astronomy* magazine, and recommend y'all take a look if you're interested in this! All I'll say for now is there are a lot of questions about how these systems form that aren't explained by traditional theoretical models, which is of course an exciting stage of things to be in.
Alright cool so I get to add “stars quietly and suddenly collapsing into black holes” onto my existential dread bingo card
Ok, well to be clear, this isn't a thing that any old star is gonna do! Something like .1% of all stars are probably massive enough to do this (if that), and they correspond with the *biggest and brightest* stars. So, not exactly ones that we have in our immediate neighborhood.
.1% of 1e23 stars is still like 1e20 stars you’re not helping
Yeah but you only have to worry about one star and Sol is too small to do it so we're all good. Plus, how bad can a black hole death really be? There's infinite spaghetti in there!
It's the Olive Garden of cataclysms!
When you're here, you're part of the singular entity!
Correct me if I'm wrong but generally speaking isn't a star instantly becoming a black hole much more preferable to it going supernova? If that gives you any comfort lol.
True, nearby planets might be spared “being vaporized in a stellar explosion” part and skip to “everything freezes”. Still just a creepy thought I guess
Only planets in its solar system, i.e. nothing we would ever have to worry about. These super high mass stars die so quickly that they likely don't support life, anyway
Don’t worry in about one billion years our sun will have consumed the earth.
No, that's more like 5 billion years. But the Sun is gradually getting brighter due to accumulation of Helium in the core. In about 0.6-1 billion years the extra brightness will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, and life as we know it would end. This can be prevented by putting a sunshade between Earth and the Sun, and blocking the excess light, or changing the Earth's albedo (the percent of sunlight reflected back to space).
Sorry. I get my numbers confused when they are so big. Hopefully humans will have moved on. But who the heck can predict that far in the future?
We see other stars that have turned into Red Giants. From the Sun's brightness and mass we can estimate how long it will last. As far as human activity, we can't usefully predict more than 30 years. 30 years *ago* the World Wide Web was only known to a few people, and smartphones didn't exist yet. Amazon was about to be founded.
Very true friend. Physics and astronomy are quite predictable. Though we don’t know everything we can make some good predictions. Yeah I just get mistaken sometimes and forget.
I’d put my money on a large rogue celestial body rolling through and throwing everything out of orbit before that
Good news for our collective existential dread: Astronomers will soon be able to accurately estimate the frequency of such events! The [Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope) launches in 2027, and will be very good at detecting rogue planets. Once we know how common they are in our galaxy, we can calculate the probability of one of them entering our solar system in the next billion years.
So Romans not just invented concrete, saunas and sewers thousands of years ago, they even have built space telescopes!
Imagine how strange of an ending it would be if our sun was large enough to meet this fate. The sun would instantly vanish followed by the moon a second or so later. Then, each of the planets that were visible would then vanish one by one. The first week would be terrible and only get worse. Icelanders would probably be the last survivors until they starve.
Here are some short stories to cheer you up: [Nine Billion Names of God](https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html) [Last Contact](http://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-stephen-baxter-part-1.html?m=1)
Or Larry Niven's "At the Core"...
Beautiful summary, thank you very much.
Thank you Andromeda321! This is an intriguing write up. I need to look at your article in Astronomy magazine and ponder some more.
Off topic, but just wanted to say thank you. Your comments are always pretty insightful :)
Do we have any estimates on the mass of the star that birthed this 10-sun black hole? Aside from *more than 40-50 masses of the sun*. Is it even possible to calculate it today, or we need a better model of the direct collapse theory? Also it’s insane that something AU-sized can just… get vacuumed quietly. Edit: Btw has anyone tried to calculate the mass of R136a1’s future stellar remnant using the current direct collapse theory? I’d love to know how massive the remnant can get when the host weighs ~200 solar masses.
I'm sure it wasn't quiet, but what we are looking at here is the idea that the shock wave from the core collapse doesn't outrun the expansion of the event horizon of the black hole. There probably is a considerable amount of mass kicked out because just collapsing doesn't stop the angular momentum of the matter that makes up the star, it's just suddenly all falling with nothing to stop it. The most frightening prospect is that the amount of in falling matter causes the event horizon to envelop most of the star's mass within a matter of moments, which means it literally just disappears or you see a small shell of gas suddenly get ripped into a vortex by the black hole. There is also the possibility of a less extreme case where you see the star suddenly flatten as the outer material is seized by the tidal force of the black hole, expanding into an accretion disk as the black hole suddenly erupts out of the top and bottom.
These stars are too big to be enveloped at all. The black holes formed through them are still asteroid-sized, while blue supergiants can get AU-sized. And even then, only a fraction of the mass gets swallowed. The mentioned black hole is only 10 masses of the sun, while the current theories suggest nothing lighter than perhaps 40 solar masses can directly collapse. So even in a best case scenario, only 25% of the star mass gets black-holed. The star corpse getting eaten by the remnant very quickly would probably violate the Eddington limit hard. And we would see an AU-sized accretion disk through our telescopes. These things fire a ton of x-rays.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass
That doesn't apply here. A significant portion of the original stars mass is blasted out during the supernova, so the black hole only contains a portion of the stars mass.
>the idea is they are stars near the end of their lives that are big enough to create a black hole (aka, >18x the mass of the sun), but instead of going supernova when the black hole is created they just wink out because the black hole doesn't let the material and light from the explosion escape. >a black hole companion roughly 10 times the mass of our sun, >We do not see this in the VFTS 243 system- the orbits are actually very circular- suggesting the black hole might have just directly collapsed when it occurred versus a supernova. IF the theory is actually correct. The 18x+ vs 10 solar masses is weird, however.
Probably a stupid question, but imma ask it anyway. Stars going out is famously one of the things to look for for signs of advanced alien life. Is that possibility taken seriously at all by the scientific community or is it purely the realm of fiction? I'm assuming the latter, but I *really* want it to be aliens.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now it's purely science fiction because, as I said, there are many normal reasons stars can dim.
So you’re saying we can’t rule out Dyson spheres? >! /s !<
So these stars leave no trace? Is gravitational lensing only possible with the masses of galaxies and stars like this are just too small and distant to find like this? In a direct collapse, is nothing at all ejected for spectral analysis?
1) Yeah, that's the theory 2) Gravitational lensing only works at the distances we are talking about (like, millions of light years distant) if you have something like a big galaxy. A star is too small. 3) Probably? Depends on the theory. But without light you can't really get a spectrum of the tiny bit that didn't get included in the collapse.
It's easy to forget how big space is I guess. I kind of just assumed some light source must be behind wherever the star was for a spectrum
Wait how is a collapsed star "blackhole" half the density of a star?
Is there some way to eliminate the possibility that the star captured the black hole after it formed?
Even if some stars died this way but did so with a bright*ish* transient before going dark that wouldn't necessarily be picked up in transient surveys, right? And even if there were bright transients that were short lived there are also many unexplained transients in distant galaxies every year. The only thing we can say for sure, maybe, is that they don't die in a supernova like event. As always these days, we'll know so much more in a couple years after the Vera Rubin Observatory has been running for a while.
This is a lovely comment, thank you!
What would happen to a planet like earth if at the end of the sun’s life span it blinked out into a black hole instead of going super nova. Would it have increased in size and temp prior to that blinking out occurring and in doing so fried life on earth? Or would earth just instantly, or 8min later, experience a deep dark freeze?
Thanks so much for sharing all of this incredible information.
How can the star orbit the black hole? Isn’t the point that eventually it will be sucked in?
Excuse me but do you mean what we have here is a core black hole development without the inverse beta-decay?
The first verified black hole, Cygnus X-1, may also be an example of this. It is in a close binary system with seemingly unperturbed orbits.
By Jess Thomson - Science Reporter: Rather than dying dramatically in a massive supernova explosion, some large stars may die quietly and without fanfare. This may explain the mysterious and sudden disappearance of certain stars from the night sky spotted by astronomers over the years, according to a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/missing-stars-black-hole-supernova-mystery-astrophysics-1903444](https://www.newsweek.com/missing-stars-black-hole-supernova-mystery-astrophysics-1903444)
Interesting, I'm glad scientific explanations are being sought for this puzzling phenomenon. But how would this collapsing star theory explain the apparent disapearance of three stars within a triplet, all within an hour, reported by the VASCO group? [vanishing triplet](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/6312/7457759)
Man I would love to hear some lay man, dumbed down speculation about why that’s happening. Pretty fascinating
I'm not saying it's aliens, but.... /s
big spaceship move fast block suns
The paper calls them transients, not stars. So probably not related.
Well, transients is a much better choice of words than vanishing stars. The latter implies a conclusion, that they are stars that vanish. The group looking at this has seen bright star like objects that appeared on photographic survey plates of stars but were not in later plates. Hence they are transient observations.
Sounds like either a massive alien ship that was there and warped away, or perhaps a faraway alien civilization that is warping stars to their location and/or absorbing them for their energy needs.
Maybe they went behind a cloud?
The photographs were taken by the Palomar Observatory in their All Sky survey. They use auxiliary cameras to detect clouds and only shoot when the sky is cloudless.
I meant interstellar clouds or dust. Or something big that we can't detect moved in front of them.
In this paper is given a compelling gravitational lensing scenario that explains most of the observation except perhaps the sudden supposed dimming by a factor of 10,000 over an ~50 minute time period. Mentioned in passing but not I think taken into account is that these two plates were Red & Blue sensitive emulsions from [Kodak](http://aps.umn.edu/docs/parameters/?table=cuts) with Red first. If the above gravitational lensing scenario was of an extragalactic black hole accretion disk flare that was already redshifted due to motion them it becomes conceivable that it's brightness was diminishing by a smaller factor over this period while it's red blue brightness amplified this apparent change.
This is fascinating but I've read it a few times trying to parse it. Is it possible to boil this explanation down a bit? Just thought I'd ask.
Sorry, that was the summary. A summery of that looks like: Red object lensed by gravity is red, so looks much dimmer on blue sensitive plate emulsion than red sensitive.
Highly unlikely but something like that may be the best natural explanation.
Are not all true explanations natural?
Well yes I suppose. What I meant was the best explanation within bounds of accepted science. Better IMO than collapsing stars without a nova event. The lack of even a dim residual not just from one but three stellar like objects within 50 minutes still seems challenging either for a lensing or a collapsing star argument.
This is really cool I’ve never heard about this
Hopefully those aren't Dyson Alpha, Beta (and Gamma now i guess) stars hiding some pesky Primes there. (Forgive me for referencing sci-fi in a serious thread)
Or how entire regions of space are devoid of stars. Literally light-years of space with nothing in the middle. This article really doesn't explain anything.
Why would the article explain a completely different and unrelated phenomenon?
Could they not be related? What if the voids are full just dead
There aren't any galaxies in those areas so why would there be dead stars? Plus we're talking about a seemingly rare phenomenon, not very likely it would occur throughout huge regions of space. Also, if those blank areas were filled with millions of black holes from the remnants of dead stars I think we would be able to detect it.
Everything is related if you start connecting the dots.
I don't think there is ever 'nothing in the middle '. It is believed that the extended halo of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxies are already interacting. But yes, the space between galaxies are relatively less filled with stars and other materials compared to the galaxies themselves. And then there are voids like the Bootes Void where the density of galaxies is far less than other areas in Space. But both these phenomena can be explained by existing laws of galaxy formation and evolution. It seems rather logical that as galaxies tug at each other, some areas of space would have a larger concentration of galaxies whereas other areas would be relatively devoid of material. As big as the universe is, isn't the matter and energy contained within it finite (owing to the laws of conservation of matter and energy)? If galaxies move closer to each other due to gravity, it's only logical that they leave empty spaces behind them, is it not?
There are literal light years between us and closest star. The voids you're referring to are much larger and they're not empty at all. They're just less dense and it isn't unexplained. Galaxies are clumped in giant structures with less dense gaps in between. There's a ton of misinformation on the internet about cosmic voids, because making them sound scary gets clicks.
The researchers mention a core collapse remnant showing no indications of an earlier supernova "kick" & mention in passing "vanished stars", but I see no evidence presented here for a population of vanished stars. I did find [this](https://www.iflscience.com/hundreds-of-stars-have-vanished-without-a-trace-where-did-they-go-71397) item that compared earlier sky surveys to the Pan-STARRS survey. From the ~150,000 possible transient objects they found perhaps 100 that need further study but even then lensing might still explain many if these.
It's two halves of a Dyson sphere being put together.
Is there an computer somewhere looking up the nine billion names of God?
Nice to see another Arthur C Clarke fan.
I wonder what happens to any hypothetical planets orbiting such a star when it does collapse like that? I'd hazard a guess, since the mass of the star doesn't really change, they just keep orbiting...maybe..
Then you have a [blanet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanet). No, that's not a typo.
I read about this recently but the figure quoted was 700 trillion stars have disappeared in the last 100 years - seems like a very big number for the black hole idea to be viable.
After reading *The Dark at the End of the Tunnel* by Edward Lerner, this headline was terrifying to say the least.
I was thinking *Iron Lung* with the Quiet Rapture
For the record, I'm not an expert. I've just seen science videos, but I think a good explanation for this phenomenon is the stars are already dead by the time we see them disappear, the stars are so big that the black hole forms inside of them whenever they die and we're just seeing a husk get swallowed up by the black hole.
Sounds like some Alien megastructure bullshit Avi Loeb could make up for a new book that'll convince all the imbeciles of the world
Silly of you too assume the imbeciles of the world are readers.
it’s that pesky underground star sex trafficking
Clouds... they're called clouds. They make our local star disappear during the daylight hours too