Missing stars could point to alien civilizations, scientists say

I already agree with Hawking that Aliens almost certainly exist. My certainty level is around 96-97%. I recently saw this article and thought it was interesting.

On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the US Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there.

Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.

The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing.

Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).

"Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."

www.cnet.com...

Of course they go on to say there must be a natural explanation even though they have no idea what one may be. Here's a pic of one of the missing stars.



I then found this interesting paper from 2018. It talked about how an advanced civilization might harvest stars by transporting them towards their civilization.

Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

The presence of dark energy in our universe is causing space to expand at an accelerating rate. As a result, over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable, but entirely inaccessible, thus limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them. Here, we consider the likely response of a highly advanced civilization to this situation. In particular, we argue that in order to maximize its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilization would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson Spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the center of the civilization. We find that such efforts will be most effective for stars with masses in the range of M∼(0.2−1)M⊙, and could lead to the harvesting of stars within a region extending out to several tens of Mpc in radius, potentially increasing the total amount of energy that is available to a future civilization by a factor of several thousand. We also discuss the observable signatures of a civilization elsewhere in the universe that is currently in this state of stellar harvesting.

arxiv.org...

Basically, you have stars that will eventually move past our cosmic horizon because of dark energy. In fact, many of the galaxies we see is from light emitted in the past. We will never see those galaxies as they are today. An advanced civilization could harvest stars and transport them to their local group which is a group of gravitationally bound galaxies before they leave their cosmic horizon. This gives the civilization more usable energy.

If this is the case, which is a very plausible scenario, then the few civilizations that might have this technology are essentially immortal. This may also mean these civilizations that have this tech might destroy civilizations before they reach this tech. You can imagine what might happen if too many civilizations have this tech, there could be sun harvesting universe wars.

It's a very interesting read by Cosmologist Dan Hooper from Fermilab.

Without additional photos of the “missing star” I see no evidence of anything other than a possible asteroid or other body within the solar system. You know that is a way of discovering comets, asteroids, planets, etc..

There must be at least two photos of the star and one without the star to have any evidence of this disappearance happening.

The article clearly states this star was in only ONE photo from the 50s.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
Without additional photos of the “missing star” I see no evidence of anything other than a possible asteroid or other body within the solar system. You know that is a way of discovering comets, asteroids, planets, etc..

There must be at least two photos of the star and one without the star to have any evidence of this disappearance happening.

The article clearly states this star was in only ONE photo from the 50s.

You can't be serious. These people are Professionals who just had a paper published.They looked at over 600 million objects in the sky. It's not just one photo.

The Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations Project. I. USNO Objects Missing in Modern Sky Surveys and Follow-up Observations of a "Missing Star"

Abstract

In this paper we report the current status of a new research program. The primary goal of the "Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" project is to search for vanishing and appearing sources using existing survey data to find examples of exceptional astrophysical transients. The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations. In this first paper we present new, deeper observations of the tentative candidate discovered by Villarroel et al. in 2016. We then perform the first searches for vanishing objects throughout the sky by comparing 600 million objects from the US Naval Observatory Catalogue (USNO) B1.0 down to a limiting magnitude of ~20–21 with the recent Pan-STARRS Data Release-1 (DR1) with a limiting magnitude of ~23.4. We find about 150,000 preliminary candidates that do not have any Pan-STARRS counterpart within a 30'' radius. We show that these objects are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects. We visually examine the images for a subset of about 24,000 candidates, superseding the 2016 study with a sample 10 times larger. We find about 100 point sources visible in only one epoch in the red band of the USNO, which may be of interest in searches for strong M-dwarf flares, high-redshift supernovae, or other categories of unidentified red transients.

iopscience.iop.org...

a reply to: neoholographic

I think a possible explanation that would be right down your alley could be the dyson sphere theory where aliens build a shere around the star to harness its energy thus making it appear like its dissapeared.

Dyson sphere theory. Check it out.

Film, processing time, telescope time, exposure time, etc.. were very expensive in the past. They would not take photos of the same area if they did not notice something interesting. If the object was too distant to leave an elongation on the photo to indicate movement, there would probably not be a follow up photo taken.

An astronomical photo is like taking a photo of the earth with a microscope. You don’t see a very big area at all or you don’t see dim objects or details. You would end up with a stack of photos taller than the tallest building if you tried to take an actual film photo of the entire sky at any significant magnification. Reducing them to microfilm is useless because the resolution of the film would be lost.

Scientists have written mistaken papers before.

Dyson spheres would be a possibility but I have a theory that they cannot be built as a sphere. Only an orbital ring would hold up to the stresses involved.

originally posted by: CthruU
a reply to: neoholographic

I think a possible explanation that would be right down your alley could be the dyson sphere theory where aliens build a shere around the star to harness its energy thus making it appear like its dissapeared.

Dyson sphere theory. Check it out.

Yeah, he talked about a Dyson Sphere in the paper but he modified it for transporting a star. It would be like if we had the tech to keep grabbing stars that's about to leave our cosmic horizon and pulling them back into our local group. We would essentially never run out of usable energy. It would allow us to overcome the naturally pulling part that's done by dark energy naturally and the civilization could last billions of years past it's expiration date.

While it may be difficult to predict the detailed behavior of an advanced civilization, it is clear that the objectives of any such system would generically require, or at least benefit from, large quantities of useable energy. With this in mind, Freeman Dyson speculated in his 1960 paper [1] that such civilizations would be likely to build structures around stars that are capable of collecting all or most of the light emitted, using this energy and then reemitting the waste heat in the form of high-entropy, infrared or sub-millimeter radiation [2]. Such “Dyson Spheres” are not only a staple of science fiction, but have also been the target of many astrophysical searches and other scientific investigations [3–23].

On timescales of tens of billions of years and longer, the expansion of the universe will ultimately limit the ability of an advanced civilization to accumulate and consume useable energy, a fact that has only been exacerbated by the discovery of dark energy [24, 25]. As space expands, stars and other objects fall beyond the cosmic horizon, making it impossible for them to ever again be observed or otherwise interacted with.1 As dark energy comes to increasingly dominate the total energy density, our universe will enter a phase of exponential expansion, a(t) ∝ e Ht, where H = H0 Ω 1/2 Λ,0 is the asymptotic value of the Hubble constant in terms of the current Hubble constant, H0 = 67.8 km/s/Mpc, and the abundance of dark energy, ΩΛ,0 = 0.692 [26]. Within approximately 100 billion years, all of the matter that is not gravitationally bound to the galaxies that make up our Local Group will become causally disconnected from the Milky Way, falling beyond the limits of our cosmic horizon [27–30].

a reply to: neoholographic

Occam...

If the picture is in the same place but at a different time, and it's not physically possible for the star to just vanish...

Maybe a larger object that doesn't emit light has moved in front of it?

Just thinking out loud...

~Namaste

It still takes a minimum of two photos, with some amount of time between them, that match to prove that a bright speck, that we cannot even see without time exposure, is in fact a star.

It could be a spot on the film.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
Film, processing time, telescope time, exposure time, etc.. were very expensive in the past. They would not take photos of the same area if they did not notice something interesting. If the object was too distant to leave an elongation on the photo to indicate movement, there would probably not be a follow up photo taken.

An astronomical photo is like taking a photo of the earth with a microscope. You don’t see a very big area at all or you don’t see dim objects or details. You would end up with a stack of photos taller than the tallest building if you tried to take an actual film photo of the entire sky at any significant magnification. Reducing them to microfilm is useless because the resolution of the film would be lost.

Scientists have wrote mistaken papers before.

Dyson spheres would be a possibility but I have a theory that they cannot be built as a sphere. Only an orbital ring would hold up to the stresses involved.

This statement makes no sense.

Do you have evidence that these Scientist made mistakes or that they're too dumb to do this research and the referees that peer reviewed this paper are also idiots? You said:

Scientists have wrote mistaken papers before.

So what.

That's just meaningless. You have to show they made mistakes in this paper and that's done by other Scientist submitting papers that point out mistakes. If you can show that these Scientist and the review board made mistakes then submit a paper to be peer reviewed.

When I saw this on the news here a week or so ago, they did mention Dyson Spheres. But they also said that it was not just one star that had vanished but a few others.

No way I can find the article, it was on morning telly, and ridiculous for everything else.

But it wasn't treated with the usual hysterical content usually offered to such things.

Good thread. I enjoy these ideas. Thanks!

originally posted by: SonOfTheLawOfOne
a reply to: neoholographic

Occam...

If the picture is in the same place but at a different time, and it's not physically possible for the star to just vanish...

Maybe a larger object that doesn't emit light has moved in front of it?

Just thinking out loud...

~Namaste

Not possible.

First, these pictures have been categorized and analyzed over the years and these data sets are used throughout the Scientific community for Research.

First, this was discovered in 2016 not by looking at 2 photos but looking over a large data set.

Our Sky now and then − searches for lost stars and impossible effects as probes of advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations

Searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) using large survey data often look for possible signatures of astroengineering. We propose to search for physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology, by carrying out a search for disappearing galaxies and Milky Way stars. We select ∼ 10 million objects from USNO-B1.0 with low proper motion (μ < 20 milli arcseconds / year) imaged on the sky in two epochs. We search for objects not found at the expected positions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) by visually examining images of ∼ 290 000 USNO-B1.0 objects with no counterpart in the SDSS. We identify some spurious targets in the USNO-B1.0. We find one candidate of interest for follow-up photometry, although it is very uncertain. If the candidate eventually is found, it defines the probability of observing a disappearing-object event the last decade to less than one in one million in the given samples. Nevertheless, since the complete USNO-B1.0 dataset is 100 times larger than any of our samples, we propose an easily accessible citizen science project in search of USNO-B1.0 objects which have disappeared from the SDSS.

arxiv.org...

As you see, they were uncertain when they first found the missing star. Like good Researchers, they proposed expanding the database to look and see if this was just a single anomaly or if they could find more missing stars. They did the Research and found 100 of these missing stars.

The Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations Project. I. USNO Objects Missing in Modern Sky Surveys and Follow-up Observations of a "Missing Star"

In this paper we report the current status of a new research program. The primary goal of the "Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" project is to search for vanishing and appearing sources using existing survey data to find examples of exceptional astrophysical transients. The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations. In this first paper we present new, deeper observations of the tentative candidate discovered by Villarroel et al. in 2016. We then perform the first searches for vanishing objects throughout the sky by comparing 600 million objects from the US Naval Observatory Catalogue (USNO) B1.0 down to a limiting magnitude of ~20–21 with the recent Pan-STARRS Data Release-1 (DR1) with a limiting magnitude of ~23.4. We find about 150,000 preliminary candidates that do not have any Pan-STARRS counterpart within a 30'' radius. We show that these objects are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects. We visually examine the images for a subset of about 24,000 candidates, superseding the 2016 study with a sample 10 times larger. We find about 100 point sources visible in only one epoch in the red band of the USNO, which may be of interest in searches for strong M-dwarf flares, high-redshift supernovae, or other categories of unidentified red transients.

iopscience.iop.org...

No more uncertainty.

a reply to: neoholographic

Don't be silly. I twas just a camera glitch from the 1950's style cameras.

Obviously. I mean, what else could it have been.. coh..



*sarcasm not required to be highlighted*

a reply to: neoholographic

Sorry about the grammar there, I edited it just after submitting.

Let’s list several scientific errors.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
a reply to: neoholographic

Sorry about the grammar there, I edited it just after submitting.

Let’s list several scientific errors.

Talking about Scientific errors is meaningless. Nobody is debating whether Scientific errors occur.

There's not a shred of evidence that Scientific errors occurred in this instance. It's just silly. You said:

It could be a spot on the film.

No it couldn't. These are not pictures found in a junk drawer. These are data sets compiled by Scientist and used throughout the Scientific Community while doing Research.

Do you even know how Science works? Again, nobody's debating whether Scientific errors occur. That doesn't mean every paper that's published has Scientific errors. There's not a shred of evidence that's there's any errors in either paper.

a reply to: neoholographic

Perhaps there is a possibility for a star to collapse into a black hole without going Nova. Perhaps something like collision with an existing massive singularity?

There are so amny phenomenons that scientists know nothing about.

Stars dissapearing due to some yet undiscovered phenomenon is a possibility.

Lets not forget that what we see actually happened millions of years ago. What for us is 1 day it could be hundreds of years. A star dissapearing could be a hundred year process.

Who knows.

Aliens building spheres around random stars across the universe is the least likely outcome.

originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: neoholographic

Perhaps there is a possibility for a star to collapse into a black hole without going Nova. Perhaps something like collision with an existing massive singularity?

Stars can Implode. Actually it is also possible those stars simply imploded rather than explode or expand into supernovas.

I have located the problem. The c-net article has little to do with the scientific paper. They saw SETI and a few other choice words and wrote “possible aliens.”

I had only read the c-net article and now I have read the scientific paper.

Yes it involves SETI.
They have used several surveys and not just the Navel Observatories from the 50s as implied by c-net.
They have checked that the missing stars are in more than one photo or survey. Information left out by c-net.
They have ruled out Dyson Spheres because of observations on other then visible wave lengths. Conveniently skipped by c-net.
They have even considered the dust and scratches that have occurred as a result of storage. Yes they were stored in film filing cabinets.

C-net dropped the ball here.

The SETI scientists are saying they don’t have any evidence of what happened but they and others are trying to figure it out. They have found this while looking for possible evidence of advanced alien civilizations.

Overall conclusion, do not trust c-net.

Missing stars could point to alien civilizations, scientists say

The aliens stole them ?
Isn't that sort of against inter-galactic law ?

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
Without additional photos of the “missing star” I see no evidence of anything other than a possible asteroid or other body within the solar system. You know that is a way of discovering comets, asteroids, planets, etc..

There must be at least two photos of the star and one without the star to have any evidence of this disappearance happening.

The article clearly states this star was in only ONE photo from the 50s.

Speck of dust on the lens..