Trillions of Stars Have Suddenly Gone Missing, Scientists Don’t Know Why!

Stars don’t just vanish — or do they? For thousands of years, astronomers accepted the idea that the lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging. Even when it became clear that these lights were actually physical objects like the sun, one of the key assumptions for astrophysicists has been that they go through major changes very slowly, on timescales of millions or billions of years.