If you’ve read any of my other pages, you know that I look up at the night sky, all the time. I live close to two airports, so I see planes all the time. And I once saw the Starlink satellites, a long chain of maybe 10 or more lights in the sky, about as far apart from each other as the stars in the Big Dipper. All moving across the sky on their way to their final orbit. The Sun reflecting off their surfaces at just the right angle to light them up. Like a guy in the desert with a small signal mirror. It was super cool but freaked me out for a moment. My point is that I’ve seen it all.
Today I saw something “unusual” in the night sky. I could see Orion, Sirius, and 3 bight dots two of them were Jupiter and Mars, because I’ve seen them for past several weeks, and I’m guessing the third was Saturn. But even after identifying those very bright objects, I saw 3 additional very-bright objects right next to each other in a straight line. Stars brighter than the belt in Orion or the Big Dipper; 3 new dots in the sky, each with brightness similar to Mars or Sirius.
I thought to myself, they must be man made. New satellites of some kind reflecting the bright light of the Sun. But they were not moving like the Starlink satellites had done. I took several photos and videos trying to get the other constellations in the same frame as these 3 dots to use as reference points. You can see one such photo to the right. Obviously I am able to edit images, I added the pink text and lines, but I promise I did not add in these 3 dots. Below is another photo, about 30-60 minutes later, from a slightly better angle in the back yard.
I watched those 3 dots for about 2 hours, it was a beautiful evening. They didn’t move like satellites, they moved with the stars, due to the rotation of the Earth. Actually it seemed like maybe they were getting “bigger”, or rather moving apart from each other and maybe even getting brighter? I took more videos and photos trying to get a comparison. But it’s hard to tell if the earlier pictures are closer together than the later ones.
So then what are they? They are far enough away to move like stars or planets across the sky. So at least as far away as a planet, not something in orbit which would move much faster across the sky. Could they be 3 new supernovae in a straight line? Or projectiles from some massive explosion very far away such that they have separated in space in this straight line? And if the light from those explosions is now visible, are the blast waves from those explosions coming our way also?
What about 3 massive objects, let’s say 2X-10X the mass of Jupiter, large enough that they have initiated Hydrogen fusion. Perhaps 3 “micro stars”. Just a few light years away, because such tiny bright stars would need to be very close to be seen.
But why are all 3 showing up at the same time? My thought? It’s another aspect of the Fermi Paradox. Let’s say that some alien lifeform detected our radio and TV signals, including from over 50 years ago, during World War 2 and the Cold War which followed. In these horrific images, they saw that life on Earth, one with violent tendencies, was just starting to evolve technologically, including creation of the atomic bomb. Suppose their policy as a species is to eliminate any and all possibilities of any potential future threat – wiping out intelligent life that they detect evolving on any nearby planet. So they launched these 3 micro stars into our Solar system, just to disrupt gravity … and maybe even explode? And these micro stars, travelling very close to the speed of light, are finally arriving within visible range, heading towards the Sun.
Imagine the gravitational influences interacting with the entire Solar System, including the Sun. You’ve heard of the Three Body Problem – that we cannot foresee the outcome of any 3 orbiting bodies because their interactions are much too complex for mathematical equations to predict exactly what will happen. Well, that alien species has just added 3 new bodies, with massive gravity interactions with each of the planets and the Sun. Including the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt. Now all of these will be disrupted by huge gravitational effects as these 3 micro stars pass through. It would rip apart everything as we know it.
We always talk about Earth being in the “Goldilocks Zone” around the Sun, not too hot and not too cold. Introducing 6X-30X the mass of Jupiter soaring into our Solar System, like 3 massive fusion comets, would cause all of the planets to leave their current orbits.
In an earlier blog I had wondered if I would be alive to see an alien life form announce their presence to all of Earth. The day we make contact, without the aliens “hiding” like they’ve allegedly been doing until now. But now arriving boldly, like THE event – when alien craft land on the White House lawn and other places around the globe and we have undeniable proof that aliens exist. I even wondered whether this event would be peaceful, more like Close Encounters, or violent, like Independence Day? And now, in this particular case, we discover that it’s actually much worse – the alien civilization pre-emptively launched 3 micro stars at us; an act designed to wipe out any hope of life on Earth evolving any further and potentially posing a threat some time in the future. It would be an Extinction Level Event, a giant reset of all life on Earth. Now I wonder … Is today the day we figure that out? The beginning of the end of the world as we know it?
Update: it’s now just after midnight, so a few hours later than the photos above. And the 3 dots are still there. Again, they SEEM bigger to me, further spread out. There was the usual smog above Phoenix, to my west, but the 3 new stars shined through that. I was not able to locate Orion, it had gone down below the horizon. But I did get another pic including the Big Dipper. The photo to the left is on the street in front of my house. I was not able to see the 3 Mystery Stars from my back yard because they were closer to the horizon, and the trees obscured the view.
Since I had an earlier photo of the 3 Mystery Stars and their relative position to that of the Big Dipper, and a second similar photo taken about 4 hours later, I decided to try to overlay one on top of the other to see if there was any relative movement. The image I had taken 4 hours later was somehow at a smaller scale. Using my photo editing software, I had to scale that image, zooming in incrementally, until the Big Dipper in both photos was identical in size. But, once the Big Dipper (and hence the entire image) had been scaled to the right size, the relative positions of the 3 Mystery Stars had changed significantly.
As you can see, I had erased nearly everything in the second photo; the only things I kept were the 3 Mystery stars and the Big Dipper stars, the rest of the image was now transparent, allowing the underlying first image to show through. If you enlarge the picture into a separate browser tab, you can see the small “blob” around each of the stars, which is as close to the stars as I wanted to get with the “eraser” tool.
Presumably there are no errors in the software that would skew the images like this. Yes, I had to zoom and rotate so that the two images would line up, but that should all be to the same relative scale and NOT cause relative movement like we see. Do you agree? Maybe I’m wrong, and everything would have lined up if I had taken two identical photos from a tripod in a stationary location. And it was only the photo editing software, due to the use of rotate and zoom, that caused a cascading error in scale that makes it appear like relative movement.
But, if I am right, it shows tremendous amount of movement in the 3 Mystery Stars. They moved further away, relative to the Big Dipper. And they moved further away from each other, relative to the center star, which “confirms” my earlier sentiment that they “seemed bigger, or further apart”.
Even if these 3 new Mystery Stars are not nefarious, just some natural event like 3 distant supernovae, hundreds of light years away, what does that mean? Why would they suddenly appear all at the same time? Is this a “sign” of something else; such as a biblical sign of the end of the world? Or a new beginning?
Or are they somehow man-made lights? I have no idea how satellites would move very slowly across the sky, similar to star movement due to the Earth’s rotation. Anything closer than the moon would be moving much faster across the sky; it would be hard to keep it “mostly” stationary, moving solely (or predominantly) due to Earth’s rotation alone.
What could they be? Will they be there again tonight? What if they’re not there? And why can’t I find any information on the www from other folks about seeing these? Surely I am not the only person to have noticed them!
Update: I first saw these 3 lights on Wednesday, April 9th, about 8:30PM. And I watched them for a few hours and kept going outside periodically, until after midnight sometime. Then again I saw the same 3 lights last night, Thursday the 10th. I am going to post a few additional unedited pics from last night.
In the photo to the right, you can clearly see all of Orion, at bottom center, near the horizon. Orion’s belt, Betelgeuse, Rigel, the sword (Orion’s nebula), etc. Following the line of Orion’s belt left, we see Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, on the far-left edge of the photo. About halfway up the photo, above Sirius and slightly right, another very bright dot, which I believe is probably Saturn. To the right of Orion, immediately above the tree, we see Jupiter. And directly above Jupiter I believe is Arcturus, in Taurus. But at the very top of the photo, we have the 3 Mystery Stars. You can see that they are not quite as bright as Sirius or Jupiter, but similar in brightness to the light that I think is Saturn. And definitely brighter than any of the stars in Orion: Rigel or Betelgeuse, or the belt.
In the photo to the left, I again have the “cup” of the Big Dipper, on the far right immediately above the tree. The handle would be further right, outside of the image. And then on the far left we see the 3 Mystery Stars. You can see that the 3 Mystery Stars are actually a lot brighter than the stars in the Big Dipper. This is what makes these 3 stars so interesting; the fact that they are literally the brightest stars in the sky, with the exception of Sirius and Jupiter (and of course Venus, which is not visible). And they are equally spaced from each other in a straight line. It catches your eye immediately, just by looking up.
Final Update: I contacted the Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory (GRCO), which is near where I live. A person named Claude told me that my landmarks are all off. The 3 Mystery Stars are actually Castor and Pollux in Gemini, and Mars. Right now they happen to be in a straight line, and equidistant from each other. He suggested I try the SkySafari app on my phone. And in doing so I could see that Pollux, Castor and Mars are all equidistant and a straight line, right now. Even though it is currently daylight outside, I found Orion and Sirius in the app. And from there, I was able to see that the star which I had labelled as “Saturn” in my photos is actually Procyon, just as Claude said. The stars that I thought were Gemini (Castor and Pollux) are actually part of the constellation of Auriga. So now it all makes sense. And I had to come up with this crazy theory of aliens trying to obliterate us :). I still think it was a “fun” mental exercise to imagine such a scenario, where advanced intelligent life on another planet might just choose to wipe out any and all potential competition.
You would think that after spending literally thousands of hours working on PlanetVRium, I would know the night sky better than I do. But, much of the time I spend in PlanetVRium is focused on how the code is working. Does the sky move correctly when I push the buttons on my controller? Did that code change I just made fix the bug I was investigating? And animating and choreographing the audio and visual in each Visual Experience takes hundreds of hours, so I am more focused on problems like: “did Saturn appear when the word ‘Saturn’ was said in the narration, or is it off by a half second?” And another thing is that the real night sky is so much larger than what I am able to simulate in VR. The stars are 1,000 meters away in VR. That is, their geometry is converted from ascension/declination to X,Y,Z coordinates. Where the maximum is 1,000 meters away from the center, where the observer is located. Unity, the game engine I am using, “clips” (removes) any object past 1,000 meters. So comparing Orion in VR to Orion in real life is a huge difference in perceived size.
Anyway, now I know. Mystery solved. Thanks to the GRCO!