We found mysterious flashes in old sky photos taken years before the first satellite ever launched.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Searching for Fast Astronomical Transients in Archival Photographic Plates
arXiv · 2603.20407
The Takeaway
By re-examining archival telescope plates from the mid-1950s, researchers found short-lived optical flashes that match the profile of sunlight reflecting off orbiting metal. Since the first human satellite wasn't launched until 1957, these flashes suggest a natural phenomenon we don't understand or something far more mysterious.
From the abstract
Fast astronomical transients were observed by the VASCO Project (Villarroel et al 2020) in photographic sky surveys conducted in the 1950s. Those searches analyzed the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I and POSS-II) digitized plates. In this article, we present a preliminary report on a similar but independent search using archival plates taken at the Hamburg Observatory with the Großer Schmidtspiegel 1.2-m Schmidt camera, also from the mid-1950s. These plates were digitized by the APPLAUSE