Could mysterious flashing lights among the stars be signals of extraterrestrial life?
Astrophysicists aren’t ruling it out. In a new paper, they’ve theorized that a number of inexplicable flickering lights observed over the decades may be “interstellar communication lasers,” used to send messages from one end of outer space to the other.
They say the blinking lights are most likely derived from “natural, if somewhat extreme astrophysical sources,” adding that the finding could change the study of astrophysics forever.
“The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations,” the authors write in their report, recently published in the Astronomical Journal.
Researchers pulled publicly accessible images, such as old military records, dating back to the 1950s. By comparing historical observations with current surveys of the sky, they were able to pinpoint instances of stars seemingly disappearing from the Milky Way. They call these vanished objects “red transients.”
“Finding an actually vanishing star — or a star that appears out of nowhere! — would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today,” says lead author Beatriz Villarroel, in a Stockholm University press statement.
As scientists understand the death of a star, their light dwindles to become a white dwarf, or they die in a sudden explosion called a supernova. But signs of a point of light in these images vanishing altogether may also tell of a new, as-yet undocumented astrophysical phenomenon, or, potentially, extraterrestrial activity.
Some have theoretically predicted the existence of “failed supernovae,” or when a massive star implodes into a black hole, but without an outward explosion. Those, still, would be very rare, scientists say.
A more sci-fi explanation for the strange lights could be that they’re lasers meant for communication via extraterrestrial structures built by some advanced alien civilizations — what scientists call Dyson spheres, that can harness the energy in stars.
Still, neither theory is proven through any observable evidence.
The project, called Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) is ongoing as just 15 percent of unexplained objects in their source images have been thoroughly investigated. So far, Villarroel and her team have noted 100 disappearing stars, adding they are “very excited” about the current discovery.
As they continue to research, they hope to involve other astronomy enthusiasts and stargazers to help parse the remaining 150,000 examples of these unexplained lights.
“We hope to get help from the community to look through the images as a part of a citizen science project,” says study researcher Lars Mattsson. “We are looking at ways to do that right now and that will be something we will be able to talk more about at a later date.”