Description

On April 12, 1950, a telescope at Palomar Observatory in California photographed a patch of sky on a glass plate. When astronomers re-examined it decades later, they found nine star-like points of light that aren’t on a photo of the same spot taken half an hour earlier and don’t show up in any modern survey.

The open challenge (https://www.researchhub.com/rfp/32931/project-lost-light) is to look at old glass plates from other observatories, using only ones taken before Sputnik. If similar flashes show up there too, it becomes much harder to explain them as defects on the Palomar plates. It’s open to citizen scientists as well as university teams and it has prizes up to $75k.

It feels like this is the closest we’ve come to a real answer on this case.