Stars which blink out and then blink on again years later (light, Milky Way)

[ocpaul20]

Scientists are studying stars which have not not died and not exploded but blink off and then some years later, blink on again and... the scientists at the VASCO network have not ruled out there may be an extraterrestrial cause. Of course, there may be a perfectly normal cause too.

Link to futurism article

With rare exception, stars die in one of two ways: they either slowly transition into white dwarfs or quickly explode as supernovae.

But some stars appear to temporarily die without a whimper or a bang — they just disappear from the night sky and then appear again later — and the scientists behind a newly published study believe this strange phenomenon could have one of two explanations: we’re either witnessing something brand new in astrophysics or seeing signs of alien activity.
Seeing Stars

On Thursday, the scientists involved in the “Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations” (VASCO) project published their first study in The Astronomical Journal, a prestigious and peer-reviewed publication. It details their hunt for objects that appeared in surveys of the night sky dating as far back as the 1950s, but that no longer appear in modern surveys.

[Michael Way]

The article as appears in sciencedaily seems to be talking about a star that either vanishes, or a star that suddenly appears, rather than stars that vanish and then reappear.

''A project lead by an international team of researchers use publicly available data with images of the sky dating as far back as to the 1950s to try to detect and analyse objects that have disappeared over time. In the project "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (VASCO), they have particularly looked for objects that may have existed in old military sky catalogues from the 1950s, not to be found again in modern sky surveys. Among the physical indicators that they are looking for are stars that have vanished in the Milky Way.

"Finding an actually vanishing star -- or a star that appears out of nowhere! -- would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today," says project leader Beatriz Villarroel, Stockholm University and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain.'' [Bolding mine]

''"But we are clear that none of these events have shown any direct signs of being ETI. We believe that they are natural, if somewhat extreme, astrophysical sources," says Martin López Corredoira, co-author of the paper, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain.''


https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1212105854.htm

So this isn't about the same star vanishing and then reappearing.

Mentioned in the article also are very variable objects which flare up for a time ''at least 8-9 magnitudes, or several thousand times brighter, in a very short time.''

[rjshae]

Of course it's an extraterrestrial cause. Or did you mean intelligent aliens? You need to rule out natural causes before you can speculate about alien technology. An example of a natural cause is Epsilon Aurigae.