Tripoli
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https://www.space.com/hunt-for-universe-missing-stars-space-mysteries
Stars don't just vanish — or do they? For thousands of years, astronomers accepted the idea that the lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging. Even when it became clear that these lights were actually physical objects like the sun, one of the key assumptions for astrophysicists has been that they go through major changes very slowly, on timescales of millions or billions of years.
And when the most massive stars of all — which are many times heavier than the sun — do go through sudden and cataclysmic changes as they reach the ends of their lives, their passing is marked by the unmissable cosmic beacon of a supernova explosion, which shines for many months, and may even be visible across hundreds of millions of light-years.
But what if some stars suddenly just wink out of visibility? According to everything we know about stars, that should be impossible, but over the past few years, a group of astronomers has set out to see whether such impossible things do happen, comparing data across decades of observations.
Related: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
ALL ABOUT SPACE
(Image credit: Future)
This article is brought to you by All About Space.
All About Space magazine takes you on an awe-inspiring journey through our solar system and beyond, from the amazing technology and spacecraft that enables humanity to venture into orbit, to the complexities of space science.
"VASCO is the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project," said Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sweden. "We're actually interested in all kinds of vanishing objects, but ideally I'd like to find a star that's been steady and has been there in the sky for as long as we can remember and as long as we have data for, and one day it just vanishes. And you can point the biggest telescopes in the world at it and still see nothing there."
Since Villarroel and her colleagues began work on the project in 2017, they've attracted a lot of attention from scientists who see the potential in searching historic records: "We have astronomers from all kinds of different fields interested in the project — specialists in active galactic nuclei [the power source of intensely brilliant quasars in the distant universe], stellar physicists, and SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] scientists — everyone has their reasons for getting involved."
Stars don't just vanish — or do they? For thousands of years, astronomers accepted the idea that the lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging. Even when it became clear that these lights were actually physical objects like the sun, one of the key assumptions for astrophysicists has been that they go through major changes very slowly, on timescales of millions or billions of years.
And when the most massive stars of all — which are many times heavier than the sun — do go through sudden and cataclysmic changes as they reach the ends of their lives, their passing is marked by the unmissable cosmic beacon of a supernova explosion, which shines for many months, and may even be visible across hundreds of millions of light-years.
But what if some stars suddenly just wink out of visibility? According to everything we know about stars, that should be impossible, but over the past few years, a group of astronomers has set out to see whether such impossible things do happen, comparing data across decades of observations.
Related: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
ALL ABOUT SPACE
(Image credit: Future)
This article is brought to you by All About Space.
All About Space magazine takes you on an awe-inspiring journey through our solar system and beyond, from the amazing technology and spacecraft that enables humanity to venture into orbit, to the complexities of space science.
"VASCO is the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project," said Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sweden. "We're actually interested in all kinds of vanishing objects, but ideally I'd like to find a star that's been steady and has been there in the sky for as long as we can remember and as long as we have data for, and one day it just vanishes. And you can point the biggest telescopes in the world at it and still see nothing there."
Since Villarroel and her colleagues began work on the project in 2017, they've attracted a lot of attention from scientists who see the potential in searching historic records: "We have astronomers from all kinds of different fields interested in the project — specialists in active galactic nuclei [the power source of intensely brilliant quasars in the distant universe], stellar physicists, and SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] scientists — everyone has their reasons for getting involved."
