Article by the ID Staff February 21, 2020 (indusdictum.com)
• In 2016, a team of Swedish researchers led by Dr Beatriz Villarroel discovered that stars have been inexplicably vanishing over the past decades. Short of completely collapsing into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which a star could physically vanish.
• Now, an international team of scientists from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (or ARIES) (in Beluwakhan, India) have published a study in the January 2020 edition of the Astronomical Journal on the one hundred stars that they’ve found missing, entitled: ‘Vanishing & Appearing Sources During a Century of Observations’ (or ‘VASCO’).
• The international team consists of 22 scientists from Sweden, Spain, Finland, USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, India, Ukraine, and the UK, including lead researcher Dr Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and Dr Alok C. Gupta from ARIES. Using the United States Naval Observatory’s star charts and records, the research team compared old and new observations of about 600 million heavenly objects. So far, they have chanced upon one hundred missing star-like objects.
• The US Naval Observatory’s star catalog contains about 2 to 3 billion astronomical objects. Located at Haleakala Observatory, (on Maui) Hawaii, it is presently the largest digital sky survey in the world. The observatory’s ‘Pan-STARRS’ (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) consists of astronomical cameras, telescopes, and a computing facility that surveys the sky for moving or variable objects. The ‘Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing’ has provided a sophisticated three-terabyte cloud environment for data analysis, which is done by breaking down the USNO/databases into many smaller ones with a smart index that cross-matches the subsets.
• The VASCO project team does not claim to have found signs of aliens. They do propose that the best places for astronomers to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and technologically advanced civilizations may be those areas where stars have vanished. While they have seen no signs of aliens just yet, the 100 missing stars might be proof of super-advanced alien civilizations.
Pune: A total of one hundred missing star-like objects have been chanced upon by comparing old and new observations of about 600 million heavenly objects recorded in the US Naval Observatory (USNO) by a team of 22 scientists from 11 countries.
Their research points out those parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish, the study explained. While they have seen no signs of aliens just yet, the 100 missing stars might be proof of super-advanced alien civilisations.
Scientists from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, an autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) have participated in this study which was published in the January 2020 edition of the Astronomical Journal.
The study titled ‘Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO)’, an international project led by Dr Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, consists of scientists from Sweden, Spain, Finland, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, India, Cremia, Ukraine, and the UK, including Dr Alok C. Gupta, Scientist from ARIES.
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