The Palomar Lights
PALOMAR OBSERVATORY
200-inch Hale · 48-inch Schmidt
San Diego County, California. Five thousand five hundred feet up, on a forested ridge in the Cleveland National Forest, sits the new 200-inch Hale telescope — the largest ever built.
U.S. Geological Survey, Santa Ana sheet, 1:250,000 — surveyed 1949.
Palomar Mountain, California.<br>November 1949.
Five thousand feet above the orange groves and the Navy airfields of San Diego County, the most ambitious map of the sky ever attempted is about to begin.
George Abell is a graduate student. From this observatory he will discover 2,712 galaxy clusters. But tonight, he just needs clear skies.
George is mapping a patch of sky. Each patch is photographed twice — once on a red-sensitive plate (fifty minutes), once on a blue plate (ten minutes). Two portraits of the same stars, in two colors of light, taken minutes apart.
For each exposure, someone must sit at the guide telescope and keep a star centered by hand.
Fifty minutes. In the cold. Night after night, for seven years.
After the exposure, the plate rides a dumbwaiter to the darkroom. Development must happen in absolute blackness. No safelights — the emulsion sees every colour of light.
1,872 exposures will be taken; only 936 pairs will pass inspection. The survivors go into drawers where they will sleep for decades…
No one notices at the time, but there's a very strange anomaly…
THE ATOMIC FLASH — 5:15 AM<br>Palomar Mountain at dawn. The dome is closed, the night's work done. On the northeast horizon — a sudden bloom of white-orange light. An atomic flash from the Nevada Test Site, 275 miles away. For a moment, the fir trees cast sharp shadows. Then darkness returns. The sky above is still full of stars.
And in the desert to the northeast, the United States is splitting atoms. The flash from Yucca Flat is visible from the mountain. The astronomers barely notice. They've been watching the sky all night — but looking the other way.
70 years later.
Chapter 1
The Vanishing
Uppsala · Zurich · The Canary Islands
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel. A Swedish physicist turned astronomer. From her laboratory at NORDITA in Stockholm, she studies the violent hearts of galaxies — quasars, black holes, things that burn.
The loud death.
Most massive stars die loud — a supernova so bright it can be seen across galaxies. Light. Heat. A funeral with fireworks.
The quiet death.
But what if one died quiet? Collapsed into a black hole without a flash? It would simply — vanish.
If a massive star collapses directly into a black hole — no supernova, no explosion — it would simply vanish from the record. Has anyone actually looked?
She proposes a research project: cross-match the sky as it was photographed in the 1950s with the sky as we see it today — and find the stars that have disappeared into black holes.
600 million objects.
She calls the project VASCO — Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations. She writes software to compare each speck of light in the 1950s sky with the sky we see today, looking for the ones that aren't there anymore.
Tenerife. Feb 2020.
On her screen: Plate XE 325 — exposed at Palomar on April 12, 1950. The plate that went into the drawer.
Villarroel<br>I was sitting there with my office mate in Spain... and I was just wondering, "So what is it? What are we seeing?"<br>— Penn State, "My Personal Journey Through the Unknown"
She sees them. Nine pinpoints of light. Clustered together on the red plate — completely absent on the blue companion plate taken thirty minutes earlier.
Exhibit A — Plate XE 325
Nine sources, clustered in a single patch of sky. Appearing within half an hour on a fifty-minute red exposure. Absent on the blue plate taken just moments before. Absent in every modern survey. Whatever it was — it's gone…
A note from the author
You're about halfway in. If this story is worth your time, drop a few dollars in the bucket — it's how I make the next one.
Buy me a Ko-fi →
Villarroel<br>So what is it? What are we seeing?
What could they be?
Quietly dying stars?
JUNE 2021 — THE DISCOVERY IS PUBLISHED.
Read the original paper at nature.com →
THE EVIDENCE
Nine point sources. Nine moments of light, photographed on a single mountain on a single night. Completely gone just moments later. Not there in modern images. Here they are, one by one.
TRANSIENT 1
TRANSIENTS 2 & 3
TRANSIENTS 4, 5, 6
TRANSIENTS 7 & 8
TRANSIENT 9
Are they satellites? If so — there's a big problem.
— Cutouts from Villarroel et al. (2021), Scientific Reports, CC BY 4.0
From the paper.
"No satellites are known to have existed prior to the Soviet-made Sputnik in 1957 — seven years after the appearance of the transients in the 1950 POSS-I image."
— Villarroel et al. (2021), Scientific Reports, p. 6. ·<br>Read on nature.com
SO — WHAT ARE WE DEALING WITH?
"…more likely explained by a Solar system satellite of artificial or natural origin."
— Villarroel et al.,...