Why 700 stars have mysteriously disappeared? From what is apparently happening out in space,
to what we're doing to try and figure everything out,
and more! Join us as we reveal to you why 700 stars have mysteriously vanished!
There are few things in this world that are meant to be constant or fully "knowable". After all, it
took us many thousands of years to get a grasp on things like science and math to help us understand
our place in the universe and what that place (meaning Earth) is about at its core (even though
we technically don't know what's inside the core). One of these principal beliefs is that of the
states of matter. If you don't know, it's the understanding that matter can't just be destroyed.
Something has to happen to it for it to "go away". For example. If you were to take a dip into lava,
your body would vanish...but only because the state of its matter has been shifted.
It's not gone, it's just in an entirely different state. Or like how a planet
explodes and it's "gone", but its matter is still out there, it's just scattered across the stars.
The reason we bring this up is that there's a bit of a mystery going on in the depths
of outer space that honestly doesn't have a clear answer as of yet. What is that mystery?
Stars...are disappearing from the sky.
At first, this might not seem like a big deal, mainly because in the grand scope of the universe
the idea of a star going away suddenly is possible given certain factors. Such as how it's reached
the end of its life, or it's been absorbed by a black hole or something equally grand.
The problem here is that the stars in question aren't singular, they're numerous. Just in
recent measurements, there appears to be over 700 stars missing and there's no clue as to how they
suddenly blinked out of existence. A handful of stars vanishing can be explained across a large
universe, but hundreds in a short period of time? Ones that WEREN'T near their ending life points
or had objects that were trying to destroy the stars? Yeah, that's a different thing entirely.
Thankfully, there are some people who are trying to figure this out:
"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." Lest you think that this is just a random group
of people trying to find something "fun to do", they've been doing this since 2017
and they have gotten a lot of attention for it: "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."
The team in question know that there are things out there we can't fully predict as it'd be
impossible to fully catalogue what is going on with every star or object in space with 100%
accuracy given our distance from them. But they're confident that if we find
the right kind of star going out from the sky...we'll learn something new:
"We know that there are variables, but their timescales tend to be a few years at most. We
want to find something that goes from a completely steady star to just vanishing entirely — this
hasn't been documented, and it's the kind of discovery that could lead to new physics."
But you might be thinking, "Can you really show that a star just blinks
out of existence randomly?" Yes, we can. For example, there was one star in 2019 that
had been studied by astronomers for quite some time. Two decades in fact. They were attracted
to the star partly because of how it shined with a crystal blue hue, and then randomly...it was gone.
Andrew Allan, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin, checked and rechecked
the data. The star was too far away for telescopes to spot it directly, so astronomers looked for the
distinct signatures that these luminous blue stars imprint on the light coming from their
home galaxy. But those traces had vanished. The likely explanation at the time was that
of it going supernova and then turning into a black hole. But...not only was there no sign
of a supernova or what it would bring, there was no black hole that could be noticed either. And
given the time between sightings, it was very unlikely that they didn't notice it.
“If indeed the star turned into a black hole with no supernova at all, then it’s a case of
‘gone without a bang’ that astronomers have been searching for for a while now,” Iair Arcavi,
an astronomer at Tel Aviv University noted. Before we dive more into this, be sure to like
or dislike the video, that way we can continue to create the best content for you, the viewer! Also,
be sure to subscribe to the channel! The theory that Iair noted was that
there is a potential for a star to simply go from "dying" to a black hole without it bursting into a
bright and massive supernova. There have even been indications of this being possible back in 2009
when a star that was in the sights of many telescopes seemed to be getting
ready for a bang...and then suddenly was a black hole before they realized it.
While they couldn't definitely prove that's what happened, it was an oddity that could not be
immediately explained, and that's a huge deal. Just as important though is that many teams,
including ones that we've talked about already, have been working on getting catalogues of stars
and their charts so that they can view them online alongside others and then compare the
data enough to see what is going on. And the results have been both promising and shocking:
"We have found a number of short-lived transients that appear on one image, and then not again.
Those account for most of what we've found so far, but there are other things we're not
sure of what they are yet. We've studied some of these short-lived transients,
and they don't seem to be M-dwarf flares [the huge outbursts caused by the tangled magnetic
fields of faint red dwarf stars that may cause them to brighten by a factor of 100 or more],
or any type of supernova. I think we can start excluding those options."
Following up on that, there is a common belief that has been difficult to prove
across some astronomers that the reason some of these stars are "blinking out" is because
of how light reaches us across the universe. Think of it like this. Imagine a light in your
room. Now imagine walking in a straight line away from it until it's gone from your view.
Now multiple that distance across galaxies. Makes you wonder how we see anything at all,
right? The answer to that is because the various light rays from these stars take a
LONG time to travel here, and even when they get here, they mix with the rays of our sun
to become more visible in our night sky. The light we're "seeing" is many, MANY years old.
In terms of our own sun, we see it brightly every day because it's constantly pumping out light to
reach us and warm us up. But even though it's "close", those rays take about 8 minutes to get
to Earth, so now multiply that by light years and you see how old those stars' light is.
Why does that matter here? Simple, because the light is so "old", it's possible that we see it
"blink out immediately" because to us it looks that way, but for the star, it's been gone for
a while, and we're just realizing it's gone. This also feeds into the notion of stars
sometimes going bright for a very large period and then going dim in a way that we
can't see them anymore because of it. It's very complex, and obviously it's unproven,
but these questions are ones that need to be asked in order to potentially find out
the truth about what's going on here. Of course...there are those who always
like to look at the "nuclear option" in terms of these theories. And for
astronomers, the "nuclear option' for disappearing stars...is that of aliens.
"But how can aliens make stars blink out?" you might be asking. Well, it's not so much
that they're blinking out...but rather...that they're containing them for their own measures.
Tell us, have you ever heard of a...Dyson Sphere? A Dyson Sphere is an object of science-fiction
(for now) that is said to be when alien civilizations (or
Earth in very rare circumstances) are able to literally contain the sun in a special device that
grants them energy and power. In other words, they turn the sun into a battery...or a weapon.
If you are a fan of Star Wars you'll recall that in The Force Awakens the Starkiller base
drained the power of a star to destroy several planets of the Republic. It's the same principal.
So here, that would mean that the stars have been contained in part or in whole to the extent that
their light can't reach Earth anymore. The reasons for this feat being hard to
fathom as a logical explanation is many-fold. Not the least of which is that aliens haven't
been proven to exist yet. But even if they were, the technology and time it would take to build a
fully functional Dyson Sphere, even around a small star, would take an incredible amount of time.
Then, when you realize that doing this across 700+ stars would be a literal galactic undertaking...it
seems incredibly unlikely. Does that stop people from
believing in it? Not a chance. So where does that leave us? The answer
is...without answers. We know that something is happening out in space
to where stars are vanishing from our charts and our sight. The question is...why, and how?
We know this can't be a fluke with one or two stars as we have found multitudes of them missing.
But then the question goes back to what is going on to cause
so many to vanish within a short period of time? This is why so many people across so many groups
are trying to figure this out. Because if they're able to answer these questions it could give us
a greater understanding of our universe. To the extent that when this potentially happens again,
we could more quickly answer what's going on. Furthermore, it might answer questions of the
past like with the 2009 star incident or the one from more 2019 that seemed to blink out.
Stars are by and large one of the most important things we study in our universe,
so learning what is going on with them is vital on a grand scale.
We may not know what's happening right now, but that doesn't mean we won't know given enough time.
Thanks for watching, everyone! What did you think of this look at the mysterious things going
out in outer space and how stars are apparently disappearing without a trace? Do you think that
there's a logical explanation for all that's going on out in space? Or is there something
that we just don't know about that is causing all the stars to blink out of sight? Let us know
in the comments below, be sure to subscribe and we'll see you next time on the channel!