Launching the VASCO citizen science project

Abstract

The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project investigates astronomical surveys spanning a 70 years time interval, searching for unusual and exotic transients. We present herein the VASCO Citizen Science Project, that uses three different approaches to the identification of unusual transients in a given set of candidates: hypothesis-driven, exploratory-driven and machine learning-driven (which is of particular benefit for SETI searches). To address the big data challenge, VASCO combines methods from the Virtual Observatory, a user-aided machine learning and visual inspection through citizen science. In this article, we demonstrate the citizen science project, the new and improved candidate selection process and give a progress report. We also present the VASCO citizen science network led by amateur astronomy associations mainly located in Algeria, Cameroon and Nigeria. At the moment of writing, the citizen science project has carefully examined 12,000 candidate image pairs in the data, and has so far identified 713 objects classified as "vanished". The most interesting candidates will be followed up with optical and infrared imaging, together with the observations by the most potent radio telescopes.

Discovering vanishing objects in POSS I red images using the Virtual Observatory

“…Sources still missing after follow-up observations could also be useful for technosignature studies like, for instance, laser searches (Villarroel et al 2020b;Marcy et al 2022). The 298 165 sources will be further examined by the VASCO citizen science project (Villarroel et al 2020a). Finally, it is also important to stress the fundamental role played by the Virtual Observatory in this paper.…”

“…Examples of exceptional astrophysical transients found with VASCO are given in Villarroel et al (2020b). VASCO also runs a citizen science project that investigates ★ E-mail: esm@cab.inta-csic.es 1 https://vasconsite.wordpress.com/ 150 000 candidates visually (Villarroel et al 2020a). This paper, conceived in the frame of the VASCO project, aims at performing an automated search for vanishing object using the digitized plates of the First Palomar Sky Survey (POSS I) and the Pan-STARRS (DR2) and Gaia EDR3 catalogues taking advantage of Virtual Observatory (VO) tools and services 2 .…”

SETI in 2020

“…The survey has many components, including hypothesis-driven searches (for instance for failed supernovae) and serendipitous searches driven by machine learning. Villarroel et al (2020b) describe the citizen science component of the project.…”

Strategies and Advice for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

“…Closely related is archival work, which makes use of data collected for other purposes. Albrecht & Balazs (1988) and Djorgovski (2000) were early proponents of big-data and algorithm-based approaches in sky surveys, a strategy followed by, for instance, Carrigan (2009) and Griffith et al (2015) for Dyson spheres, and the VASCO project for disappearing stars (Villarroel et al 2020). More targeted data is also useful, as with the Tellis & Marcy (2015) and Tellis & Marcy (2017) searches for continuous wave lasers near nearby stars and potential Habitable Zone exoplanet host stars.…”