Three stars ended up disappearing in 1952. Until now, they have remained lost.
Three Lost Stars
Back in July 1952, Palomar Observatory was conducting a photographic survey all over the night sky. It was part of the project to snap several images of the same sky region in order to possibly distinguish cosmic objects like asteroids.
By roughly 8:52pm of July 19, a photographic plate snapped the light of three stars that were together. These stars were quite bright in the snap with a magnitude of 15.
By 9:45 pm, the exact same area of the sky was snapped once more. However, by this time, the three stars could not be found. They apparently vanished completely in just less than an hour.
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Why Did the Stars Vanish?
Stars do not just vanish. While they may burst and go through a brief bright period, they do not just vanish.
However, the photographic evidence was there. The three stars could be clearly seen in the first shot but they were no longer present in the second one.
It was first assumed that these stellar bodies may have dimmed suddenly, but this is an explanation that is hard to swallow. Further observations revealed that there is no evidence that stars go dimmer than a magnitude of 24. This entails that the dimming may have happened by a factor of 10,000 or more.
Another idea behind the sudden vanishing or dimming holds that these three lost stars may just be one stellar body. It could be that the star brightened for a brief moment like a magnetar's fast radio burst. While this took place, it may be possible that a black hole the size of a star passed between this star and the Earth. This may have caused gravitational lensing in the flare, which may have caused the star to appear like three different bodies for a short period.
However, the concern with this idea is the great rareness of this event. Nevertheless, other photographs taken during the 50s reveal similar disappearances of several stars that took place rapidly. In certain cases, minutes of arc separate the stars. However, this would have been hard to pull off in cases of gravitational lensing.
Another hypothesis is that these lost stars were actually not stellar bodies. The three were within 10 arcseconds of each other's coverage. If these were three different cosmic objects, something could have caused them to momentarily brighten. With the 50-minute timespan taken into account, the speed and causality of light would require that the distance of these objects did not exceed 6 AU or two light-years.
The object may have been Oort Cloud objects that were caused to simultaneously brighten. They may have drifted in their own orbits later on, which could be why they were undetected in later observations.
It is also possible that these flashes were not objects at all. Since Palomar Observatory is not far from nuclear weapon testing sites in New Mexico deserts, radioactive dust may have affected the plates and created bright spots.
To verify things, additional observations need to be made. What lies behind these lost stars remains a mystery that is yet to be unraveled.
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