Astronomers Are Not Excluding Aliens for the Disappearance of 100 Stars

Astronomers involved in the Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) projection suggest that at to the lowest degree 100 stars that appeared in the mid 20th century has disappeared till now.

Co-ordinate to their initial predictions, the reason for the disappearance could be short-lived stars or the disappearance of a grouping of stars that lasted for ages. However, the astronomers hope that their study could help unveil the mysteries of extraterrestrial activities.

"VASCO is a project that is both a Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence(SETI) project and a conventional astrophysics project. Even if we do SETI and have SETI questions, we are too interested in publishing other results that we find along the fashion.", says Beatriz Villarroel, a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.

It is hard not to detect when a huge group of stars explode or burn-out. What'due south unnoticeable is when stars vanish from the sky with no prior indication and that'southward exactly what Villarroel and her team aim to find out.

Villarroel has a team of 20 astronomers and astrophysicists with the same goal. With a combined endeavor, the team compared a series of heaven images taken by the Us Naval Observatory (USNO) in 1949 with observations by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response Arrangement between 2010 and 2014.

To make this possible, the team used software that analyzed 600 million light sources and found 150,000 missing ones. These missing lights were referenced from other datasets to filter out the irrelevant stars and concluded that 100 stars had vanished.

"Nosotros have washed the best piece of work to remove anything that resembles whatever artifacts…Yous would have to exclude all-natural things, and then there might also be new natural phenomena that we don't know about, which tin be more exciting", Villarroel added.

If you're interested, check out the entire findings of the astronomers in the Astronomical Journal here. So, practise you believe in aliens or extraterrestrial beings? Tell us in the comments.