Vanishing Stars

An artist’s conception: Betelgeuse recently dimmed to 50% of its brightness, raising concern that this supergiant star was about to vanish.

Here is a possible explanation for Betelgeuse

Possible Physics of Disappearing Stars

Could a star just vanish? The search for vanishing stars is important for two reasons:

First, some supernovae may fail to explode, as predicted by computer simulations. If so, the original star will be sucked into the central, collapsing black hole, causing the star to vanish. What fraction of massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and die, not with a bang but with a whimper?

Second, vanishing stars may also be a sign of extra-terrestrial technology. For example, Dyson spheres could cause a star to vanish (for an overview see Villarroel al. 2016, Villarroel et al. 2020).

Since VASCO started up in 2017, we have been searching for vanishing stars in the Milky Way through citizen science and automated methods. We are comparing images from the 1950s with images from modern sky surveys. We have found thousands of objects visible in the 1950s that no longer are seen today. We ourselves, refer to these as ”short-lived transients”, as we think most represent the bright state of an astrophysical object that brightened up for a few minutes later to dim again, rather than a star that actually vanished. We are, nevertheless, examining each ”vanishing star candidate”.

The star Betelgeuse in Orion is a supergiant that has strangely dimmed in recent years. Here is a depiction of what it would look like if it dimmed much more.

Some supernovae may fail to explode, as predicted by computer simulations. If so, the original star will be sucked into the central, collapsing black hole, causing the star to vanish. Indeed, the star in Orion,

What fraction of massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and die, not with a bang but with a whimper? No one knows.

Many point sources of light in the night sky have vanished. One example is above.

Large telescopes, such as the 1.2-meter Schmidt telescope on Mount Palomar, took photographic images of the entire sky in the 1950’s. Those photographs were obtained before Sputnik, i.e., before the sky had any glints from satellites. These photographs offer the opportunity to search for glints from satellites before humans launched any.

We collaborate with the Spanish Virtual Observatory and to citizen scientists in these searches.

So far, we have found not a single failed supernova or Dyson sphere candidate, setting the detection rate to less than 1 in 600 million during 70 years.” (Solano et al. 2022)