Going Dark: The Mystery of Vanishing Stars

SETI Talks

Time: Wednesday, Apr 21, 2021 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Location: Online

Background image credit: Danielle Futselaar

Comparing a 70-year-old survey with recent images of the night sky, astronomers have discovered that 100 stars may have gone dark. Those vanishing light sources could be short-lived flashes in the night or possibly, the disappearance of a long-lasting star. These preliminary findings almost certainly represent natural and well-understood events, but there is the hope that they could indicate technological civilizations elsewhere.

We invited two astronomers to discuss this extraordinary finding and the future of this research.

Beatriz Villaroel is the principal investigator of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. She led the effort to compare a series of sky images taken by the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), starting in 1949, with recent observations by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) between 2010 and 2014. While searching for vanishing stars, the VASCO project found ~100 red transients; objects found in the old Palomar plates that did not appear in the new ones.

James Davenport is a Research Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington and the Associate Director of the DiRAC Institute. He advocates using big data techniques to search for intelligent life in the universe and leads multiple data-driven technosignature projects, including at the Vera Rubin Observatory. This 8m telescope will start scanning the sky once every few nights in late 2022 and speed the hunt for such transient objects.

These astronomers will give us an update on the search for vanishing stars two years after their discovery. They’ll discuss the possibility that we are seeing unknown phenomena or that the vanished “stars” could be relics of technologically advanced civilizations, particularly the theoretical mega-engineering projects known as Dyson spheres. Either way, this discovery has turned up something that may become very important for both astrophysical and SETI investigations.

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Beatriz Villarroel is the principal investigator of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project. She got her master’s degree in 2012, the same year she received the Crafoord stipend for young researchers from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2017, Villarroel received her Ph.D. from Uppsala University for research on active galactic nuclei and soon after started her first postdoc at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Since 2018, she is a postdoctoral researcher at Nordita in Stockholm (Sweden) and IAC Tenerife (Spain). This year, Villarroel received the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in Sweden for her work on VASCO and the searches for vanishing stars (and ET).

James Davenport is a Research Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington and the Associate Director of the DiRAC Institute. His research focuses on survey astronomy, using large volumes of data from observatories and telescopes worldwide (and in space!) to study nearby stars in the Milky Way. Davenport is an expert in the magnetic activity behavior of stars, including hot flares and cool spots on their surface, and is interested in understanding how these events may impact life. He has also become an advocate for using big data techniques to search for intelligent life in the universe and is leading multiple data-driven technosignature projects over the next five years.