Notwithstanding the great accuracy of the catalogued positions of
telescopic fixed stars and of modern star-maps, the certainty of
conviction that a star in the heavens has actually disappeared since
a certain epoch can only be arrived at with great caution. Errors of
actual observation, of reduction, and of the press, often disfigure the
very best catalogues. The disappearance of a heavenly body from the
place in which it had been before distinctly seen, may be the result
of its own motion as much as of any such diminution of its photometric
process as would render the waves of light too weak to excite our
organs of sight. What we no longer see, is not necessarily annihilated.
The idea of destruction or combustion, as applied to disappearing
stars, belongs to the age of Tycho Brahe. Even Pliny makes it a
question. The apparent eternal cosmical alternation of existence and
destruction is not annihilation; it is merely the transition of matter
into new forms, into combinations which are subject to new processes.
Dark cosmical bodies may by a renewed process of light again become
luminous.--_Humboldt’s Cosmos_, vol. iii.