A new paper published in Nature magazine entitled "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950" describes an anomalous astro-photography image taken in 1950 that shows 9 bright objects that weren't there on another photograph of the same section of sky 30 minutes later.
2 images taken 30 minutes apart in 1950. First image shows 9 anomalies (marked with green circles, purple are scanning defects) not present on the 2nd image. Paper postulates that the anomalies are possibly due to atom bomb contamination or temporary objects in geostationary orbit before the human spaceflight era
One of the most important tools available to astronomers are surveys. Astronomical surveys of the night sky. These surveys involve photographing an entire section of the night sky with telescopes for general use, rather than aiming the telescope at anything in particular.
Several astronomers were recently looking at some photographs from one such survey, the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (NGS-POSS), for the first time.
Glass plate photography was the gold standard up until 1998-2000 when CCD sensors finally became advanced enough to supplant them. These photographic glass plates required long exposures - 30 minutes each.
The NGS-POSS was exposing plates in pairs. One plate sensitive to red light, then a second one of the same spot of the sky 30 minutes later, this one sensitive to blue light. Put them together, and you get most of the color information about the light.
This meant that this survey actually had two photographs of each section of the sky it covered, taken 30 minutes apart. This was why our intrepid astronomers, the heros of this story, were looking through these plates. They were looking for anything that could be seen on one plate, but not the other. A transient. Often such transients are nothing interesting, or some form of contamination of the plate, occasionally someone sneezed too close to one, that kind of thing.
But sometimes, a transient would represent something truly interesting. Many discoveries in astronomy have been the result of looking through surveys for such transients.
The astronomers had only just begun their search when they came across something that was utterly astonishing. Something that had never once been seen in the entire history of the field of astronomy.
They found 9 transients that were visible on a red plate, only to have vanished just 30 minutes later on the blue plate. Transients are usually found in isolation, or occasionally 2 at once. But never 9. Surely this had to be contamination. This was their first guess.
And it was also the first thing they ended up ruling out. They have a lot of experience identifying the various types of contamination that sometimes befall these plates, but no known form of contamination could have produced these transients.
Even more interestingly, these transients were dots. Points. Remember, these are long exposures and the earth is rotating. This elongates stars or any other distant objects into smears, short little lines in the direction of rotation.
The paper authors came to 2 conclusions;
1) the objects were due to radioactive particles, possible from atom bomb tests. Kodak has experience of such contamination on photographic films in the late 40's and 50's, so this is possible as this video elucidates.
However, radioactive contamination would surely affect other plates as well. Also, the light wouldn’t be right and there were no atom bomb tests in 1950 anyway.
2) these are reflections off of unnatural objects intentionally placed into geostationary orbit around Earth years before we had the capability to do so.
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