One thought that always fascinated me was the idea that maybe our universe does appear to outsiders … but it only appears as a sudden momentary flash. We see billions of years, they barely notice a spark.
The possible reasons are all pretty bland; gravitational lensing, nebular refracting, or they weren't stars at all but rather asteroids (with a vector of motion in-line to that of the LoS of the observation).
It's not like these stars had ever been catalogued before the first plate, so its not like these objects were long-standing unchanging phenomena that suddenly disappeared. These are hour-long transients of which there have been hundreds recorded.
In ALL liklihood,this was something teresstrial in origin. Radioactive dust, even just car headlights getting reflected by a raindrop or something could do it…
From the article: A third idea is that they weren’t objects at all. Palomar Observatory isn’t too far from the New Mexico deserts where nuclear weapons testing occurred. Radioactive dust from the tests could have contaminated the photographic plates, creating bright spots on some images and not others. Given similar vanishings seen on other photographic plates of the 1950s, this seems quite possible.
astronomy
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