It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Whatever the explanation is, this is certainly an intriguing mystery, as the researchers noted:
We believe the mystery of the simultaneous transients is a detective story worth of the attention of the astronomical community.
Bottom line: Astronomers in Sweden are trying to solve the mystery of the nine weird transients that were seen in a photographic plate taken at the Palomar Observatory in 1950. They were never seen before, and have not been seen again since.
earthsky.org...
I wish they said WHY they don't have access to the original POSS-I plates. Do the plates still exist? If so, are they being held by some meanie who won't allow other scientists to examine them?
The best way to exclude the possibility of contamination causing the simultaneous transients is by examining the original photographic plates with a microscope. Unfortunately, we have no access to the original POSS-I plates.
A human source may be to blame. Small local events in an observatory have been known give rise to anomalous detections, e.g. the potassium flare stars[16] that were spectra contaminated by French matches, the discovery of unusual radio bursts, that were caused by microwave ovens[17]. In a recent search for laser signals from Proxima Centauri, it was carefully demonstrated how extraordinary spectral signals reminiscent of lasers can be produced by the presence of a calibration lamp during the observations[18]. Humidity can also leave traces in a photographic plate.
originally posted by: gortex
Transients marked in red on the left but absent in the image taken 6 days later.
The same 10 x 10 arcmin field shown in POSS-1 and POSS-2 red bands. In the POSS-1 image we see a number of objects that cannot be subsequently found, marked with green circles. Purple circles are artifacts during the scanning process.
As we look up at the starry sky, countless celestial bodies silently peer down upon us. Most of these have been there for billions of years as stellar processes slowly unfold, starting from their birth until their final demise. Light from other celestial objects, though long vanished, has only recently reached us. In other instances, swift changes in the sky occur at timescales as short as seconds or minutes, like when a dwarf star momentarily flares up or when a human satellite crosses the field of view.
My team has been searching for objects that may have vanished. As an unexpected result of our searches, we found cases where multiple star-like objects (transients) appeared and vanished in a small image within an hour, and even more peculiarly, two of our brightest cases happened in July 1952, coinciding in time with the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flyovers. But what have we actually found, and how do these two events potentially link to one another?