For the first time in history of astronomy, 9 star-like objects appeared and vanished! Scientists baffled; alien links?

It has never happened before! A number of star-like objects appeared and yet there is no trace of them today. Now, aliens have appeared in the equation.

Astronomers have identified a curious occurrence of nine star-like objects that appeared and vanished in a small region within half an hour. (AFP)

This event has happened for the first time in the history of astronomy. Everyone knows that the universe is in constant motion and most of the objects in it follow certain rules. So, when something happens that is quite mysterious, like a disappearance, it instantly draws attention from the public at large and the astronomers too. Just such an 'event' happened a long time ago and it has baffled everyone. This in turn has made some to start linking the occurrence to aliens.

Astronomers have identified a curious occurrence of nine star-like objects that appeared and vanished in a small region within half an hour on an old photographic plate. Before jumping to any conclusions, know that astronomers collaborate across countries and track vanishing and appearing celestial objects by comparing old images of the night sky with new, modern ones, register unnatural phenomena and probe deep into such phenomena to record changes in the universe.

Scientists from Sweden, Spain, the US, Ukraine, and India, including Alok Gupta from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Nainital, investigated an early form of photography that used glass plates to capture night sky images of April 12, 1950, exposed at the Palomar Observatory in California, reports PTI.

For the first time in the history of astronomy, transient stars were detected, which were not to be found in photographs half an hour later and not been traced since then. Such a group of objects appearing and disappearing at the same time has never been detected before.

The astronomers have not found any explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lensing, fast radio bursts or any variable star that could be responsible for this cluster of fast changes in the sky, reports PTI.

"The scientists are exploring the reason behind the observation of these strange transient stars and are still not sure about what triggered their appearance and disappearance. The only thing we can say with certainty is that these images contain star-like objects that should not be there. We do not know why they are there," Gupta said.

Among the answers may well be a very humdrum one. The photographic plates may have been contaminated with radioactive particles, causing false stars on the plates.

But if the observation is proven to be real, another option is solar reflections from reflective, unnatural objects in the orbit around the earth several years before the first human satellite was launched, the Department of Science and Technology said.

The astronomers, who belong to the collaboration Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO), have still not sorted out the root cause of the "nine simultaneous transients".

Of course, another explanation could well be explained by looking for a link to aliens. The astronomers are now eager to look for more signatures of solar reflections in these digitised data from the 1950s in the hope to find aliens.