In 1952, a group of three stars disappeared in less than an hour: astronomers still can’t find them
On July 19, 1952, the Palomar Observatory, located in San Diego County (California, USA), took photographs of the night sky as part of a project to detect unusual objects, such as asteroids.
About an hour apart, they photographed the same part of the sky and then compared the resulting images.
At 8:52 PM they photographed an area of very bright stars, including a cluster of three closely spaced stars. They were too bright to be asteroids, so everyone agreed they were stars and not something else.
Nearly an hour later, at 9:45 p.m., astronomers photographed the same region of sky again and were surprised to find that the cluster of three stars had disappeared completely and not just shifted. Within that short period of time they seemed to have ceased to exist.
The sudden disappearance of stars is highly unusual; Normally, stars can undergo changes, such as explosions or dimming, but they do not disappear without a trace.
In this case, the potential dimming of the stars would have to occur on a colossal scale – by a factor of 10,000 or more – to explain their disappearance from the photos.
This enigma leads to speculation about the catastrophic event, possibly of universal proportions, that could cause such a rapid and complete extinction of stars.
Recently, Enrique Solano’s research team re-examined this incident and made several assumptions.
The first theory proposed was that there were not three stars, but one. And that it temporarily became very bright as a result of a fast radio burst, and then a black hole of stellar mass passed between Earth and Earth, causing the burst to gravitationally spread briefly into three stars.
The problem with this idea is that such an event is extremely rare. Almost exceptional.
Second, it suggested that the cluster in the photo was not actually stars, but other objects, possibly from the Oort Cloud, where an event had simply caused them to become very bright temporarily.
A more extravagant theory was that the photo was accidentally exposed to radioactive dust.
The fact is that the Palomar Observatory, according to the authors of the theory, is located relatively close to the New Mexico desert, where nuclear weapons tests were actively conducted in the 1950s.
The radioactive dust from the tests may have contaminated the photographic plates, causing bright spots in the first image. In the 1950s, scientists repeatedly noticed spots of radioactive dust on photographic plates, so the theory is quite real.
The truth is that the distance from the desert where the nuclear tests were conducted to the observatory is actually more than 700 miles. In fact, the entire state of Arizona lies in between. Isn’t the distance too great for radioactive dust?
As for ufologists, they have long believed that Californian astronomers accidentally photographed huge alien ships, which soon flew to another place at superluminal speed, which is why they were not in the second photo.
