Disappearing Stars From 1950s Catalogue Explained in a Unique New Way

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Hello and for % this is Anton, and today we're going to go back and discuss this somewhat unusual mystery that takes us back to the middle of the last century.

[00:00:09]And specifically, the mystery that began before spaceflight and before the first satellites entered orbit. And well, here we're talking about a series of studies from the last few years that essentially focused on this somewhat bizarre detection of vanishing stars or something else that seems to have appeared and disappeared in certain types of astronomical observations.

[00:00:30]Sometimes in the 1950s. But specifically though, we're going to be discussing some of these most recent studies from just the last few weeks that first seem to discover even more of these vanishing objects detected by a different telescope, as well as a new analysis and new interpretation of what these objects seem to show us. And so here, we're going to discuss these vanishing stars, this secret Cold War history, and the modern scientific debate that's now officially started. But first, a brief background on how this all began and what was initially discovered. And this is what's known as the VASCO project, Vanishing and Appearing Sources During the Century of Observations. This began a few years back, and it's essentially a project that focused on 70 years of different photographic plates collected by various astronomical facilities during the early 20th century. And well, in one of these surveys conducted by the Palomar Observatory, researchers seem to have uncovered thousands of bizarre observations that showed us something appearing in one of the slides and then disappearing in the other slide. And because most of these slides were basically 30 minutes apart, it suggested some kind of a vanishing object that only lasted for possibly a few minutes.

[00:01:42]And in the past, we discussed a lot of potential interpretations here, including possibly some unusual supernova, possibly stars that just collapsed and became black holes, or more controversially, maybe unusual objects in orbit around the planet indicating something of artificial origin or basically yeah, aliens. But as always though, let's be clear, it's never aliens. Anyway, so here we had a somewhat strange mystery. And especially because some of these even appeared in groups like in this particular slide involving triplet transients, which was detected in July of 1952. But basically disappeared completely 1 hour later. And once again, this is actually important because whatever this was showing us, it could not have been some kind of a satellite like made by a human because this was 5 years before the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.

[00:02:31]And so if these were real objects, there was no good explanation for what this was. For example, if this was a field supernova, why were we actually seeing so many all over the place? And why in this case do we have three of them? But once again, before we jump into some kind of an alien interpretation or extraterrestrial technology, we do have to first examine exactly how this was produced and what this involved. And the reason this is important is because this involved Kodak photographic plates, something that at this time was used by a lot of different astronomical facilities. And while you might want to check out one of the previous videos where we discussed this in a little bit more detail, but in a nutshell, back in the 1950s, because astronomers did not have any digital sensors, they used these Kodak glass plates coated with the light sensitive emulsion of silver halide. And specifically major surveys like the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey 1 and even the one from the most recent study in the Hamburg Observatory in Germany, basically relied on the exact the same model of photographic plates, Kodak 103A, a highly specialized fast spectroscopic film emulsion that was used for long exposure astronomical photography during the '50s. And so here this was usually done in a very similar way. Researchers would take two different plates and would expose them under a telescope at different times, normally approximately 3 minutes apart.

[00:03:52]But both plates were slightly different and were actually sensitive to slightly different wavelengths. But, nevertheless, both the Palomar Observatory and this particular observatory in Hamburg that relied on the APPLAUSE archive seem to have discovered very similar transient events. In other words, both the American and German observatories that used very similar telescopes and used very similar Kodak materials seem to contain these vanishing stars. And so, the obvious question here was Okay, well, was this some kind of an artifact, or was this an actual object or some kind of an actual light emission in the night skies that was physical in nature?

[00:04:29]And this is, of course, where we have these two completely different types of studies focusing on completely different interpretations and different types of evidence. On the one hand, because these plates were notoriously sensitive and prone to emulsion flaws, one explanation involves basically abnormalities inside the plates, or essentially tiny bubbles or tiny holes in the chemical layer inside the emulsion that can easily appear as a dark spot on a picture and may even look like a star, but just a little bit different in terms of shape.

[00:04:59]And well, at least one previous study, the more skeptical study, pointed out that if you look at the spatial distribution of all of these vanishing stars, they very often seem to cluster around the edges of the plate or even corners of the plate, which is what you would usually expect from some kind of a handling error or from a chemical degradation. But, we also have other explanations. And specifically, explanations in regards to when this happens. So, here we have to briefly discuss the nuclear secrets of the Cold War. And so, here there's an even more fascinating and somewhat grim possibility that a lot of this might have been caused by radioactive fallout.

[00:05:36]And that's because back in 1945, Kodak officially discovered that the US was testing nuclear weapons. And [snorts] that was before it became public knowledge. And the reason Kodak became aware of it is actually kind of interesting. Now, once again, the video in the description provides a little bit more info, but essentially some of the scientists working at Kodak started to notice these mysterious dark patches and strange spots all over the film that was then traced to a specific contaminant referred to as cerium 141, the isotope that only comes from nuclear explosions.

[00:06:09]And turns out that wind carried some of the fallout from New Mexico to location with the river that was actually used by the paper mill responsible for producing Kodak's packaging. And so, a lot of the boxes where these photographic plates were eventually stored actually contain radioactive material that made many of these plates essentially useless. And because both of these surveys, the Palomar survey and the Applause survey, were conducted during the same period between 1949 and 1958, it actually overlaps perfectly with the era for the most intense atmospheric nuclear testing in the United States. And so, here the nuclear fallout explanation actually does make a lot of sense. That's because we know that charged particles from this fallout, like for example protons and alpha particles, can easily create very sharp circular dots inside the photographic film. But then we have that third opinion, the proponents of this actually being real objects and not some kind of a mistake with the plate. And here they do have [clears throat] an interesting counterargument. In one of the studies, researchers used what's known as the Earth's shadow test.

[00:07:14]Basically, if these flashes were just random plate defects, they would be distributed quite randomly and would appear anywhere on the plate. But scientists discovered that there seems to be a significant deficit of these plates inside the region where the Earth's shadow should be. And their logic is that if these objects were reflecting sunlight, or basically these were actual physical objects that reflected sunlight as they passed around the planet, they would theoretically vanish once they entered the Earth's shadow. And so, here we had at least one potential evidence that maybe this was a physical object. On top of this, there was a kind of an unusual temporal correlation between various nuclear tests and the appearance of these bizarre vanishing objects. Or basically, more of these objects seem to appear in the same period of time as extremely powerful nuclear tests. But this was mostly based on some of the preliminary discussions from some of the older studies. Then, in some of the newer studies from just a few weeks back and specifically this study by Walters and the team you see here, researchers decided to critically evaluate all of this and suggest that we should be very, very careful. And specifically, they argue that the correlation with nuclear tests might be just an illusion caused by the telescopes' observational schedule. In other words, there's a kind of a selection bias. But once the data is properly normalized and you adjust for the actual number of days the telescope was operating, the correlation disappears completely. And so, in this case, the peaks seem [snorts] to just match the schedule for when the Palomar telescope was most active. On top of this, they also disprove this idea of shadow. And so, even though the original team claimed that there was a deficit of flashes in the Earth's shadow, this team reanalyzed the data and found no such deficit, concluding that the flashes seem to appear regardless of whether the area is in shadow or light. And this reanalysis was very important because an independent team had to confirm the initial proposition before any of this could be stated with certainty. And so, here we have our first disproval. As a matter of fact, they even suggest that many of these aligned clusters of transients actually contain known catalog of stars or even obvious scan artifacts. And so, there's a major quality issue with a lot of data. And specifically, there is a lot of issues with the plate defects and even scanning defects because a lot of these had to be scanned using various digital scanners.

[00:09:35]But importantly, once again, authors point out that many of these unusual transients or flashes resemble classical signatures of mechanical or chemical artifacts and not astronomical objects.

[00:09:47]With the authors basically concluding that well, they think there is no evidence for anything major here and once again highlights that we do need to have rigorous data before any major conclusions can be reached. So, basically, they suggest there is no anomalous phenomena here, but there seems to be some kind of an issue with either plates, data collection, and the procedures used in storing and scanning these plates. And at least one other study that involved computational algorithm that tried to validate these results additionally confirmed that there seems to be no correlation with nuclear tests. In other words, a lot of these vanishing stars seem to have basically happened randomly. But, in the most recent study from April of 2026, another researcher, Kevin Ken, discovers a slightly different correlation that's also kind of intriguing. Here, he actually looked at space weather and specifically the solar activity. And so, here the author investigates whether geomagnetic activity and specifically solar storms possibly affected the appearance of these transients because maybe this is something that was influenced by the Earth's magnetic field and involved some kind of a charged particle trapped within it. And here, the study hints at some kind of a relationship between geomagnetic storms and the transient detection. Basically, when the Earth's magnetic field was relatively quiet, there were a lot of transients detected. But, during the intense geomagnetic storms, detection dropped by nearly 90%. And to the author behind the study, this possibly strengthens that nuclear link. In other words, by accounting for these solar storms, this nuclear transient correlation becomes statistically stronger and possibly presents us with the new, but once again, unusual explanation. Here, we have a kind of a Van Allen hypothesis. The paper concludes that a lot of these transients may be physically coupled to the radiation belt in the geosynchronous orbit. And the author suggests that at least some of these transients could be caused by high-energy particles interacting with maybe atmospheric discharge triggered by nuclear radiation that seems to only occur when the magnetosphere is in a specific state. In other words, it seems to explain this as some sort of a actual physical manifestation that possibly happened as a result of nuclear explosions which produced a lot of emissions that eventually reached the Van Allen belts.

[00:12:06]And so here the author suggested wherever these transients are, they may involve unknown atmospheric effects or some kind of an atmospheric discharge that was possibly triggered by nuclear radiation and might have been an actual physical phenomenon occurring in space.

[00:12:21]So essentially something that seems to be activated in the Earth's magnetic environment by various atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s. And since many of these transients seem to appear very narrow and seem to be much sharper and much more round, at least compared to other stars, it would imply that whatever this was, it could have been an extremely quick flash less than a second long that instead of producing a star-like effect, produced a kind of a snapshot from these unusual sparks in the atmosphere. And so quite an intriguing new explanation, but obviously still has to be confirmed by other teams. As a matter of fact, this one would be very difficult to prove because atmospheric nuclear tests have been banned for a very long time. And so trying to recreate this somehow would be extremely challenging and difficult to prove. Which I guess leaves us with this final question. So, what is the actual answer? Well, whatever it is, I'd have to still argue that it's definitely not aliens. And instead we seem to have two possible explanations. One very mundane but involving a bit of a mystery and one possibly involving new phenomena. So on the one hand, this could be the result of the old technology, chemical flaws, and radioactive contamination of the photographic plates. But on the other hand, this could be the result of atmospheric nuclear tests producing visual effects which were then captured by many of these surveys. Or it's possibly a combination of these explanations because many of these transients actually do appear slightly different. And while it is obviously very tempting to think that these pre-Sputnik era detections were alien probes, right now there is no evidence for any of this. Instead, it seems to point at something caused by the atomic age and many of these nuclear tests.

[00:14:02]Naturally though, it's still important to study this because a lot of these anomalies are eventually going to help us understand how to analyze data better and possibly reveal new phenomena. And so we'll definitely come back and discuss this more in some of the future videos. Until then, thank you for watching. Subscribe. Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Support the show on Patreon where you can find additional videos. Videos without any ads can be given directly or by joining a channel membership you can get to early access. You can also support this channel by buying a wonderful person t-shirt in the description below. Stay wonderful. I'll see you tomorrow and as always, bye-bye.

[00:16:16]>> Mhm.