Astronomers misread – From a college stargazing mistake that turned out to be an airplane to real cases where researchers mistook the Sun, Mars, and microwave-oven leaks for cosmic phenomena, astronomers keep learning the same hard lesson: skepticism matters—but so does careful ver
One evening during college, I was stargazing with a young woman I was trying (way too hard) to impress. I pointed out a very bright, reddish object near the horizon and told her, “Oh hey, that’s Mars,” adding a rambling explanation about how it was rising about now and commenting on its color.
Then she said, “I think it’s moving.” I dismissed it because it was Mars and, as I told myself, it could rise only so quickly. But after another minute I squinted harder—and something didn’t fit. Was there a green star right next to it? That wasn’t possible.
It became obvious what was happening: the “planet” wasn’t the Red Planet at all. It was an airplane. The timing of its motion had been foreshortened by the way it was near the horizon. and its initial color came from navigational lights; through thicker air and haze. the red light would have appeared much brighter than the green one.
She laughed at my mistake, and I’m sure my face turned as red as the iron oxide sands of the fourth planet. There was no second date. Eventually—painfully—my own arrogance wore down. I still like to explain things, though, which is, after all, why you and I are both here.
It turns out that many astronomers have made similar errors, just with bigger stakes and more formal machinery behind them.
Kat Ross, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, studies distant, luminous galaxies. Her work relies on radio telescopes, because those galaxies are very bright in those wavelengths. And because the sky is dark in radio waves, astronomers can observe them even during the day.
Ross wanted to track how the brightness of these galaxies changes over time. so she observed them at several different points during the year. In one dataset, a very bright radio source appeared that hadn’t been there before. It showed up in several contemporaneous images in the same spot. so it was clearly real—but it didn’t appear in an image taken eight years earlier. meaning something had changed significantly.
Excited by what it could mean, Ross started talking to colleagues because the source wasn’t just bright—it was the brightest source in the sky. Then she checked the observation logs and realized the truth to her shock. The “mysterious object” was the sun.
Ross had been observing during the day without realizing she was pointed at the sun. It wasn’t present in the earlier observations of that same patch of sky because those observations were taken at a different time of the year. changing the sun’s position relative to the background stars. She didn’t publish her “discovery” in a science journal.
A different kind of imposter story unfolded in 2018. when astronomer Peter Dunsby of the University of Cape Town found an extremely bright “optical transient”—an astronomical term for something that either moves or changes brightness—in the well-studied area of the sky near the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius. Its brightness was so high it was easily seen even by eye.
He reported it to The Astronomer’s Telegram site, a clearinghouse designed to rapidly disseminate discoveries worldwide so other scientists can jump in and observe the object themselves. Dunsby gave the necessary information, and the excitement in his post came through.
Then, just 40 minutes later, he issued a follow-up. In the words of his follow-up post: “The object reported in ATel 11448 has been identified as Mars. Our sincere apologies for the earlier report and the inconvenience caused.”
How that mistaken identity affected his broader plans—whether it “spoiled a future date,” in the spirit of my own evening—wasn’t part of the record here.
There’s also a case that wasn’t a mistake so much as a near-miss: perytons.
In 2007. radio astronomers received a big shock when two scientists. looking through archived data from 2001. noticed a powerful burst of radio energy detected by the Australian Parkes radio dish. The flash was called the Lorimer Burst, after the team leader who discovered it. It was far more luminous than anything seen like it, and the entire event lasted only about 5 milliseconds.
What made it especially attention-grabbing was its signature: dispersion. As radio waves travel across the universe, interstellar gas muddies them, creating a characteristic delay in the signal that depends on frequency.
That attention grew as radio astronomers, over the years, found many other bright, rapidly fluctuating sources. Two radio telescopes—Parkes in Australia and Bleien in Switzerland—reported many such objects. But these differed from the earliest event: they lasted longer, about 250 milliseconds, while also showing dispersion.
It soon became clear the sources weren’t coming from far beyond Earth. They were originating on or above Earth. After many attempts to pin them down, a team of astronomers figured it out in 2015.
The flashes weren’t caused by extragalactic black holes. They were triggered by hungry astronomers inside the observatory who couldn’t wait for the microwave oven to ding before opening the door and grabbing their food. When the door is opened. the oven continues generating microwaves that rapidly change frequency as the power dies off over a fraction of a second—mimicking dispersion. With the door open, those emissions could be released into the universe, including into the nearby radio dish.
The timing pattern added another clue: the events were always seen during normal weekday operating hours and peaked at lunchtime.
Because astronomers knew perytons weren’t cosmic sources, the name stuck—an inside joke referencing a fictional beast with the hybrid body of a stag and bird but cast the shadow of a human, a nod to the way the signals were “imposter” events.
Ironically, there was a second twist. Once astronomers were confident that perytons weren’t cosmic, they started doubting the reality of the Lorimer Burst as well. Over time, though, astronomers conclusively showed that the Lorimer Burst was indeed real and came from a distant galaxy.
Today, the Lorimer Burst and other similar events are called Fast Radio Bursts. Yet even with that confirmation, astronomers are still trying to nail down their origins.
The through-line across all these stories is stubbornly human: it’s good to be skeptical of what you see. but skepticism can’t turn into dismissal. In the end. the science moves forward by asking hard questions—then by checking the logs. verifying the signal. and making sure reality really matches the story your eyes wanted to believe.
astronomy astronomers Mars mistake airplane misidentification Kat Ross Curtin University radio telescopes sun in radio observations Peter Dunsby The Astronomer’s Telegram ATel 11448 perytons Lorimer Burst Fast Radio Bursts dispersion microwave oven Parkes radio dish Bleien telescope