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Strange Astronomical Observations that Defy Easy Explanation

Triton's orbit around Neptune is retrograde - it has been suggested that it is a captured Kuiper belt object.

In the example cited, there might be a large perturbing object farther out or perhaps the system had a close encounter with another star. Once the orbital parameters are better know, it should be possible to use simulations to see which scenario is more probable.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
Besides KIC 8462852, other strange anomalies crop up in astronomical observations that are hard to explain as naturally occurring. I thought I'd collect them in a new thread rather than muddy the KIC 8462852 thread.

These are two anomalies that caught my eye recently.

A star, HD 101065, that apparently harbours elements that should not exist in nature:
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700+ stars have apparently just disappeared over 70 years:
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Wikipedia has a list of stars whose brightness variation is strange:
List of stars that dim oddly - Wikipedia

These are really weird and while I don't like aliens-of-the-gaps explanations, I can't explain the observations in the two videos.

Are there any other similar observations that make you think WTF is going on out there?
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Could those stars that have suddenly disappeared over the last 70 years actually have been stars that used up of their energy hundreds of millions of years ago and the last of their light is finally fading?

Or could light from the vanishing stars be light from stars on the other side of a black that is between us and the star when the black hole? Could possibility exist that starlight from the other side of the black hole traveling through the galaxy, but where the star is in no jeopardy of being consumed by the black hole, was projected on our side of the black as a false image of the star on rhe side of the blackhole?

Blackholes consume all light, but what a wormhole? Could a wormhole capture light form a star on its far side and then wrap that light around to our aide?

What is needed to understand the disappearing stars is create a chart where we assume that there is a wormhole between us and the disappearing stars.

If my theory holds correctly, most of the disappearing starlight should plot along a central centerline of rotation with the frequency of disappearing stars gradually reducing above and below the centerline.
 
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How many of the disappearing stars have been classified as short lived Wolf-Rayet stars?

Are the stars considered early Universe stars that could have used up all of their energy?

Black holes are regions in space-time where gravity's pull is so powerful that not even light can escape its grasp. However, while light cannot escape a black hole, its extreme gravity warps space around it, which allows light to "echo," bending around the back of the object.

If the object is a wormhole, the star light on the distant side of the object could have been 100 million light years away from the object and then fizzled out. The light, still traveling even though the star is gone, encounters the black hole or worm hole, echos, then fades out without any reason on our side of the object.
 
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Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are stars that have effectively lost their outer envelope of hydrogen. They do not vanish without trace. High-mass WR stars (roughly 10+ solar masses, depending on metallicity) shed their outer layers and explode as supernovae and collapse to a neutron star or black hole. Low-mass WR stars (< 10 solar masses) shed their outer layers as a planetary nebula and become a white dwarf.

The stars in this study apparently just disappeared without leaving any trace. It would be best to try to obtain multispectral observations of their last known location, preferably in infrared, microwave, and radio wavelengths. As the historic data was not set up to study these stars specifically, there is likely scant information available on their spectra. However, the lack of any supernova remnant or planetary nebula (which persist for tens of thousands of years at least) suggests these were not WR stars. Far too many stars disappeared, in any case. In our Galaxy, a supernova is believed to occur about once every hundred years, and about one star becomes a white dwarf every year.

I don't know how to test your other hypotheses other than if a chance alignment made it look like a star was visible only for a short period of time, we would see this in modern data and we could make detailed multispectral observations of these transient objects. Gravitationally lensed objects due to a black hole or wormhole might be identified by distortions of their image but I'm not sure how you would distinguish between them.
 
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I think a black hole still factors in somehow. Would a black hole be able to be detected in the background of the disappearing stars?

Newly discovered black hole.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/11/worl...content=2021-11-11T17:30:36&utm_medium=social

After reading the article, are any of the disappearing stars in the same region as the black hole?

I also think that a black hole might cause some kind of shift in the light of the star, even if the star is not being consumed by the black hole, there should be noticeable differences in the light of the stars that are disappearing compared to stars outside the range of influence of the black hole.

The light has to be reflecting off of something to create the disappearing star.

Try this.

You have a flashlight and highly polished, angled surface. If you turn the flash light on the surface and hold out your opposite hand, the light from the flashlight should be recreate as an echo on your hand.

Instead of flash light and hand, we instead have a star and distant region of space where the stars light is being reflected to.

Thus,we have a Llamba Calculus Box. We know what is causing the disappearing light, a star buy we don't know what is causing the light to vanish. We have the input and output so what is in the box?
 
The apparently disappearing stars are all over the night sky. I recommend reading the original paper for details of the survey. I agree that transient gravitational lensing events can't be excluded but I haven't run the numbers on what this implies for the population of black holes in the galaxy. I would expect X-rays to be detectable from at least some of them.

As for wormholes, I don't know of any natural negative energy source that could conveniently hold macroscopic ones open. I believe even microscopic ones would only be open for the order of the Planck time - far too short a time to be detectable. We don't have a good theory of quantum gravity to model them in any case. That also applies to black holes, where we end up with paradoxes that defy easy resolution.
 
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On a different note, a possible candidate for Planet 9 has been found in old IRAS data from 1983:

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The suggestion is that it might be a 3 to 5 Earth mass planet about 225 AU from the Sun - or it might just be some other infrared-emitting galactic fluff aka "cirrus".

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.03831.pdf

From the information given on page 9 of the paper, the object - if a planet - should be somewhere near Eta Cephei (η Cephei) and NGC 6946 (the Firework galaxy) in the sky. The position of the object seen in 1983 was about halfway between η Cephei and NGC 7023 (the Iris nebula). That's about 67.7° out of the Ecliptic and about 7.6° from the galactic plane.
 
That's a pretty dire piece of science journalism. I'll wait to see if a better summary becomes available elsewhere. I don't subscribe to Nature so I can't read the original.
 
An interesting video about what the true nature of black holes might actually be:
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Effectively, space-time would not exist within the event horizon. This actually corresponds to what an external observer sees as infalling objects appear to take an infinite amount of time to cross the horizon. They become frozen on the horizon (and infinitely red shifted) so the step to conceiving their component strings being stretched out over the horizon doesn't seem that inconceivable.

This idea has been my intuition for a couple of decades so it's pleasing to see I might have been correct. If it were confirmed by experiment it might also lend credibility to string theory although I suspect that other theories might yield similar predictions. However, getting information out of a black hole remains the stumbling block. The only observables are the mass, angular momentum, and electric charge plus any characteristics of the Hawking radiation. It does seem as though it'll be very difficult to get around cosmic censorship.
 
Textures and domain walls are interesting…now I have heard it said that “merging black holes may create bubbles that could swallow the universe”—but my guess is that a true vacuum can only exist where the two event horizons overlap..Venn diagram style.
 
I assume what you mean by true vacuum is absence of space-time where quantum fields exist. The fuzzball theory suggests that is the state inside the event horizon in any case. By the way, there is no configuration where overlapping event horizons is stable. Collapse to a single horizon within a short time is inevitable due to energy loss through gravitational radiation.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
The jury's still out. None of the natural explanation appear to be a very good fit because the infrared observations don't seem to match up. Hopefully, some observing time will be allocated to this object by the James Webb Space Telescope, which would provide results in the range from long-wavelength visible light (0.6 μm) to mid-infrared (28.3 μm). The next dimming events are predicted to occur in about 4.3 years time.
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In a few weeks James Webb Space Telescope will be launched. Some scientists believe it is so powerful it will be able to peer back, even to the years it was first proposed and budgeted.
 
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