Images from the Palomar Observatory have revealed evidence of powerful solar flares that occurred near Earth in the 1950s, when there were no satellites yet. New research confirms their existence.
Mysterious flashes
A study has been posted on the arXiv preprint server that may suggest something unusual occurred near Earth in the 1950s. At least, that is what the Hamburg Observatory’s archival data suggests. Scientists have detected mysterious flashes in some of them.
In fact, this story actually began back in 2019. For many decades now, astronomers haven’t just been gazing at the sky—they’ve been constantly photographing it. In fact, so many photographs are taken that the work of identifying what is in them could take decades.
In 2019, the VASCO project was launched with the goal of applying a neural network to large volumes of historical photographs taken many years ago in search of something interesting. The search focused on the archives of the Palomar Observatory—one of the largest and oldest in the United States.
Specifically, the scientists were interested in transients—sources of light that appear for a brief moment and then disappear, either temporarily or permanently. Their research in recent years has revealed a world of phenomena unknown to scientists until now. And while the VASCO project discovered transients, the scientists were not pleased with the findings.
What was that?
The Palomar Observatory took photographs with exposures lasting tens of minutes, capturing all the light that fell on the plates during that time. Therefore, images of stars appear to be stretched out over time. However, once the light from these sources is distributed across their surfaces, it is possible to determine their duration.
So, the spots that the researchers had been looking for were just too distinct. For them to be seen, a flash much brighter than the stars would have had to occur over the course of a few seconds, and very close to Earth.
But the photographs in which they were found were taken in the 1950s, when there were no satellites in orbit yet. The result was so staggering that the scientists decided to set it aside for now, in the box where they keep their various mysteries.
And now other researchers have begun examining similar images from the Hamburg Observatory and have found the same thing. Apparently, something actually flew past Earth during those years, but what exactly was it? Scientists hope that they will eventually find the answer.
According to phys.org
