Star blinks off

Last night I was out on a walk and looking up at the sky with my kids trying to spot shooting stars when a star just blinked off. I watched the spot for a long time thinking maybe a cloud or airplane or something had simply blocked view of the star, but it never came back. I always thought a star dying would be a bright flash or something, not just shut off like that.

reply to post by KSprepared


How long were you watching the star before it disappeared?

pretty sure it was a sattelite if anything at all imo

Can you narrow down the area of the night sky you were observing? If you have never used Stellarium before, i highy recommend that yu download it (its free) and be able to give us all a better idea of where exactly in the sky you were looking.

I am skeptical that you indeed saw the death of a star, as I would think that it would be a news story somewhere, as astromers across the globe would wat t observe, but at the same tme, with the seeming countless number of stars in the night sky,, I dont think ts impossible, just inprobable that it would happen with little fanfare.

My Dad said he saw a star die when he was a child, apparently It's an extremely rare thing to see.
What you saw sounds genuine, when star's die they do just blink out like that, the light stopped millions of years ago, alo't of stars we see In the night sky's these days proberly die'd a very long time ago, crazy huh?

Most stars we see have already burnt out but the light still takes millions of years to reach us here on Earth, so if you were actually able to witness the last of the photons to get to Earth that's amazing!

reply to post by youdidntseeme


Star death would be witnessed over the course of a month...it would never be instantaneous.

There are a couple possibilities. If the "star" was only noticed when it disappeared, then it could've been a satellite disappearing as it entered the Earth's shadow. It could also have been a meteor entering perpendicular to the atmosphere (meaning it would, essentially, have been coming straight down from overhead). Or, it could've been a satellite flare/Iridium glint.

Some stars do just fizzle out if they are small, but it's most likely a satellite reflecting sunlight until the sun or satellite has moved out of position, due to the angle of incidence to be seen from your position.

A couple of years ago while sitting out in my yard sky watching with my family, I saw the exact same thing. I watched this star for a few minutes thinking that I didn't remember there ever being a star in that position that was so bright. Then no sooner than I thought that the star just "blinked out". I was stumped and asked my husband if he saw it and of course he said no. It was pretty cool to see though!!!! I also presonally don't believe it was a star at all.

Two words: Dyson Sphere

Read a really cool book about a pair of stars that were enveloped in a Dyson Sphere to contain an aggressive species. Great book called Pandora's Star.

I see this often, I don't have a large patch of sky to see from my back porch but what I can see is pretty decent, so the brightest ones I'm pretty familiar with. Sometimes they blink off and then the next night they are there again, I never really thought it was an odd thing lol. Something like high thin clouds I can't see at night or something, or space junk blocking the view, I dunno.

Your not alone, this has happened to me twice.

As a youngster i used to be in to astronomy so i'm familiar with stars, planets, and what satelites look like.

One evening i was at work. I work outdoors.

I glanced up at what i believed was Jupiter. Same magnitude, right part of the sky. There were no clouds that evening. A few minutes later i looked at it again.Still there in the same spot, and then it literally dissolved into nothing, and didn't come back. Obviously not Jupiter then.

Ive seen the same thing happen with a star. I have no explaination.

I am downloading stellarium so I can tell you more accurately where I saw it

I had the same thing happen at work one night.
I used to star gaze a lot, because a night job can get kind of boring,
and I was looking at a star and after about a minute or two, it just went out like a lightbulb.
I always liked to think I watched a star die or something like that. I have no idea why it quit shining.
This was about 13 tears ago.

I still star gaze a lot, but I have never seen that since.

I have seen the exact same thing! You're standing there looking at a normal-looking star, and it seems like just a little bit after you look at it, it just disappears. It doesn't just flash away in a split second, it's more like it is attached to a dimmer switch and the dimmer switch is turned down really, really fast. I have no idea what this phenomenon can be, but I sure would like to know.

Ok, I DL'ed Stellarium, and remember where I was looking when it died out or satellite disappeared. It was around 21:50 Central Time and the object was halfway between Arcturus and Antares. Around the position of Unukalhai. It was fairly bright, about half as bright as Arcturus and I saw it for about 15 seconds before it died, and watched for about 5 minutes for its return. This is all the info I have on it.

I went fishing this weekend and i saw like six of them, its shooting star season but unfortunately it was a full moon so we didn't have the best sky to spot shooting stars.

So my guess, since all of us (5) noticed those flashes star, at least a dozen, its not a star dying.
More like very little fragment entering the atmosphere and disentagrated in a different fashion.
I saw one series of 3 flashs in the same direction (path) of a shooting star at one time but i'm pretty sure it wasn't a satellite.

I have not read one article on an astrophysics or astronomy site that documents a star loosing its luminescence, and never suddenly. There's a myriad of perfectly natural causes for one to think they saw a star disappear. It would be blasted all over the astronomy and space exploration web, it would be BIG news. There are hundreds of thousands of astronomers looking at the sky all hours of the earth day. It wouldn't go unnoticed. Sorry to not just swallow an event like that but something in the story is mistaken. Could have easily been a high commercial jet.

First of all if one can see the star with an unaided eye then it's a quite documented one, and second we would like to know how much light pollution you live around, could greatly increase the observational status of a star, making the news of it vanishing even bigger.

reply to post by KSprepared


The ISS actually went over half an hour after, at 22:20 central time, passing through the exact spot you mentioned.

Around the time you specified, though, there were several satellites in the vicinity: SL-3 R/B @22:09, NOAA 17 @21:58, Intercosmos 25 @21:47.

The duration (15 seconds) would lead me to believe it wasn't a meteor, as a meteor entering into the line-of-sight would have appeared, gotten brighter over maybe a second, and then disappeared. It would never have lasted 15 seconds.

Also, over the course of 15 seconds, you should have easily noticed any motion if it were a satellite, and, when satellites disappear, they typically do so over a period of several seconds. And, especially in this case, for the satellite to not appear to move over 15 seconds, it would have to be moving extremely slow...which would cause it to disappear at an even slower rate. As far as I know, a satellite would never disappear instantaneously (even in the case of an Iridium glint).

It's also possible for objects, like asteroids, to occult stars, if they happen to pass directly between the observer and the star, and happen to be large enough and/or close enough to block the star's light. However, this would be short-lived, and the star would certainly have reappeared within the 5 minutes you continued to watch.

To sum that up, I guess, I'm not sure what you saw. And, the fact is, many people have had similar sightings. It's not a rare phenomenon.

ETA: as I've said, the other thing it was not is the death of a star. Stars "die" much slower, and the reduction in luminosity occurs over a period of days, even weeks. Star death is not instantaneous.

Reply to Illustronic

I never said it was a vanishing star, it could very well have been a satellite going into the shadow of the earth as someone else said. I live way in the country and was on a dirt woad about 500 feet from the streetlamp, no light pollution, although the moon was very bright and distinct last night. I am only asking about an event I witnessed, why the attack?? And nobody asked you to believe me anyway, go read a different thread.