On July 19, 1952, the Palomar Observatory conducted a photographic survey of the night sky, attempting to capture multiple images of a specific area to help detect objects such as asteroids.

At about 8:52 that evening, a photography team captured the light from three stars together.

The same area of ​​the sky was recaptured at 9:45 p.m., but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. Within an hour, it was completely gone.

Experts revealed that stars may explode or shine for a while, but they never disappear. However, there was photographic evidence.

So one hypothesis is that it might suddenly become dim. But even this is hard to accept.

There are opinions which indicate that it is not three stars but one star. A star may be briefly bright, such as a fast radio burst from a magnet. As this happens, a stellar-mass black hole may have passed between us, causing the gravitational lensing flare to briefly turn into three images. However, such an event is extremely rare, but other photographs taken in the 1950s show many stars disappearing similarly quickly.

Another idea states that the three bright spots are not stars because they are located within 10 seconds of each other. If they are three separate objects, something must have caused their brightness. Given a period of about 50 minutes (between detection and disappearance), a causal relationship with the speed of light would mean that the distance between them should not exceed 6 AU. This means it should be no more than two light years away.

Since some of the events were caused to glow at about the same time, they could be objects from the Oort cloud. As it drifted in its orbit, subsequent observations failed to detect it.

There is an opinion that the Palomar laboratory is not far from the deserts of New Mexico, where nuclear weapons tests took place. The experiments resulted in radioactive dust contaminating photographic plates, causing bright spots to appear on some images but not others.

Given the similar fades found on other photographic plates from the 1950s, this seems entirely possible.

At this stage, no idea can be confirmed. Modern astronomical observatories can only capture some of these events, where they can quickly return and make additional observations.

Source: ScienceAlert