While watching the night sky in 1952, astronomers at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory were baffled when three stars simply vanished from a region of the sky. The vanishing stars, which had been seen as a cluster of three “star-like” points, were there at one point. However, when astronomers looked at the same patch of sky an hour later, the stars had disappeared.

Despite the decades since the 1950s, nobody has ever managed to capture images of those three star-like points ever again. This has, of course, only deepened the mystery surrounding these possible stars. However, a new study may offer some answers to this decades-old conundrum.