(left, seen as the bright source at the center of the square)
has
disappeared in a later image.
(2019)
old views of the sky with what we see today and find that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up...
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).
The project team believes their search for vanishing stars could be useful in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by identifying "hot spots" in space where an unexpectedly large number of stars seem to be missing.
The idea here is that a very advanced alien civilization may be able to construct a hypothetical megastructure called a 'Dyson sphere' that completely encompasses a star in order to capture a large portion of its energy.
For now, though, the hundred or so stars that have been seen going dark so far don't appear to host aliens.
Alien megastructures have been suggested as plausible explanations for other strangely behaving stars, like with erratically dimming and brightening Boyajian's Star, but so far other natural explanations are more readily accepted by most scientists.
Next, the researchers hope to enlist the help of both citizen scientists and artificial intelligence to continue examining images for possible stars gone missing.
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