Disappearing stars: one further explanation

One of the numerous anomalies of the recent cosmology are the disappearing stars (see for instance this and this) The latter popular article tells that a group of astronomers has discovered around 100 stars, which have disappeared from view in the last 70 years – and they don’t know why. For instance, astronomers remain baffled by what appeared to be a trio of stars disappearing ‘within 50 minutes’ in 1952. The first article gives a list of explanations. The prosaic explanations are as follows:

1. Instrumentation Errors: Some of the vanishings could be due to errors or malfunctions in the astronomical instruments used to observe these stars.
2. Data Processing Errors: Errors in the processing of astronomical data could mistakenly categorize a visible star as having vanished.

There is a long list of less prosaic explanations.

1. Gravitational Lensing: The gravitational field of a massive object, like a black hole, can bend the light from a star, making it appear to vanish. This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing. The lense effect caused by an object between the observer and star would create a ring which is too weak to be visible.
2. Transient Light Phenomena: Events like gamma-ray bursts or other short-lived luminous events might cause a star to temporarily flare up before disappearing.
3. Natural Dimming: Stars may naturally dim over time due to changes in their life cycle, although this usually doesn’t result in a complete disappearance.
4. Obstruction by Cosmic Objects: The light from a star could be blocked by interstellar objects like dust clouds or newly formed celestial bodies, causing the star to appear as if it vanished.
5. Supernova Events: One explanation for a star’s disappearance could be a supernova, an event marking the explosive death of a star. However, supernovae leave behind distinct signatures, often observable as a bright burst before the star’s remnants fade away. In cases of disappearing stars, such signatures are notably absent.
6. Black Hole Consumption: Another hypothesis is that these stars could be consumed by black holes. This would theoretically happen without the typical bursts of energy associated with such events, leading to a sudden disappearance.
7. Dyson Spheres: This is a speculative theory suggesting advanced civilizations could build massive structures around stars to harness their energy, potentially causing the stars to disappear from our view.

TGD adds one possible item to this list.

1. TGD predicts a hierarchy of effective Planck constants having arbitrarily large values. This implies quantum coherence in arbitrarily long scales. Ordinary matter, when in phases characterized by h_eff different from h, behaves like dark matter but does not correspond to the galactic dark matter. It however explains the increasing fraction of missing baryons as a transformation of ordinary baryons to their large h_eff counterparts predicted by the TGD view. In biology these dark baryons and also electrons could play a key role. In the TGD Universe galactic dark matter would consist mostly of dark energy assignable to the space-time surfaces that I call cosmic strings. They can thicken to monopole flux tubes. This process, which is analogous to inflation, transforms the dark energy to ordinary matter.
2. Zero energy ontology (ZEO) is the second key element of TGD and solves the basic paradox of the quantum measurement theory and extends it to a theory of consciousness. There are two kinds of state function reductions (SFRs).

   The sequence of “small” SFRs (SSFRs) is the TGD counterpart for the repeated measurements of the same observables and gived rise to the flow of consciousness.

   “Big” SFRs (BSFRs) are the counterpart of ordinary SFRs and involve the change of the arrow of time. In the time reversed state the classical signals sent by the system travel to non-standard direction of time so that this kind of system cannot be detected by classical means. If falling asleep corresponds to BSFR, one can understand why we do not remember anything about the period of deep sleep.

3. TGD predicts an hierarchy of values of h_eff and therefore hierarchy of quantum coherence scales. Magnetic/field bodies of physical systems like stars would carry these phases with a very large value of h_eff. They would also emit radiation which has a large value of h_eff and can be observed only if it transforms to ordinary radiation.

Could one understand the disappearing stars in terms of BSFRs occurring in astrophysical scales at the level of the magnetic body of an astrophysical system? This would require that most of the observed classical radiation from the star arrives from the magnetic body of the system as a dark radiation. This is because for ordinary matter the period of phases with a reversed arrow of time are very short so that effectively there is no arrow of time.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.