In all cases, not only were the stellar masses still present, but the amount of mass had actually increased. Gravitational wave detectors, though, soon found something odd. The first 3 stars that had disappeared were still completely dark. If they were being blocked by dust clouds (a hope some of us still held onto), the increased sensitivity of the JWST may have been able to see through them and confirm that the stars were still there. One of the first things we did was to aim the telescope at the regions of space occupied by the vanished stars. Although official channels will tell you that it's still undergoing testing, we have been actively collecting data since early February. The James Webb Space Telescope first came online a few months ago. Unfortunately, the Hubble wasn't sensitive enough to tell us any more than that. The only conclusion we could draw was that some unknown influence, traveling close to the speed of light, was shrouding (or destroying) these stars. These were all in the same stellar neighborhood, only a handful of light-years from each other. This binary system was also about 15 light-years closer to Earth than the star that had previously disappeared in 1993.Īfter carefully reviewing millions of Hubble images, two more stars were identified which had 'gone out', in the years 19. Instead, both stars faded individually over a period of minutes, separated by a span of about 8 hours.
If a cloud of interstellar dust was the culprit again, they would have both seemed to disappear simultaneously, or very close to it. The two stars in question were part of a binary system, orbiting each other at a fairly close distance. Due to the circumstances of this event, this was much more concerning. At the time, we thought the most likely explanation was that a cloud of interstellar dust had drifted between Earth and the star, occluding it from view. This star was already too faint to see with the naked eye, and ground-based telescopes had trouble picking it out from among the surrounding stars, so the event wasn't widely known to the public. It didn't go supernova, or die naturally, it simply went dark, over the span of a few minutes. In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope saw a star disappear. Fuck, I wish those were the case, as the truth is much, much worse. No, the Earth isn't flat, and aliens don't control the government. I work for NASA as an astronomer, and there are certain things we keep hidden from the public.
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