4 ms·
Stars have vanished without a trace. where did they go?
- underseacables 3y agoI've always heard that if you see a star, you're seeing the light from a star that is long dead. Could not the light completely reach us and fade away? What makes a star permanent?
- thombat 3y agoCertainly not true for almost all stars visible to the naked eye. Consider Alpha Centauri, well known to all southern hemisphere inhabitants and just four light years away.
- ShamelessC 3y agoTruly awful website keeps reloading every few seconds. I think it even changed to a different CSS at one point? Then it crashes. Mobile safari. I only have so much patience as the subject matter and mysterious tone of the title are ripe for clickbait.
- buildbot 3y agoNo issue on iOS 17.2 for me with safari at least. I learned something new at least, I was not aware this has actually ever happened.
- buildbot 3y agoInteresting this has actually been observed to happen! Two stars disappearing from the night sky, is the central plot point in the first book of the commonwealth saga by Peter F Hamilton, which I quite enjoyed. I wonder if the 1952 event was what inspired this plot point…
- Sabinus 3y agoMy favourite science fiction book, highly recommended.
- bouvin 3y ago"overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
- croisillon 3y ago"the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
- samspenc 3y agoI remember reading this quote before and had to search for it, it's from Arthur C Clarke's 'The Nine Billion Names of God' (the very last line in the short story) https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
- Karellen 3y agoSo that was the hidden purpose behind generative AI technologies all along!
- hotnfresh 3y agoThis is very nearly the same as when this was posted a few days ago, except this time it omits what sure seemed like the most likely explanation (at least for most of them): the stars were never there, and were just radioactive contamination of (especially) 1950s astronomy photo negatives. On account of all the above-ground nuclear testing.
- neilv 3y ago"In 1952, a group of three 'stars' vanished–astronomers still can't find them (phys.org)" | 41 points by pavel_lishin 4 days ago | 12 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38088183
- aninteger 3y agoThey clearly went to GitHub ;).
- underseacables 3y agohttps://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question41.html https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/que...
- sieste 3y agoI like this explanation[1]: We live in a simulation where crypto became popular. All those hash function evaluations can't be approximated by the simulation engine, unlike most other natural phenomena, and so our reality uses up more compute than it was allocated. The renderer compensates by removing the most distant objects. It's a cosmic renice. [1] https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a308f88d https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a308f88d
- nrclark 3y agoNo ...It was indeed not a dream. We really did it. The King of All Cosmos has really done it. A sky full of stars ... We broke it. Yes, We were naughty. Completely naughty. So, so very sorry. But just between you and Us, It felt quite good.