Launching the VASCO Citizen Science Project

Abstract

The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project investigates astronomical surveys spanning a time interval of 70 years, searching for unusual and exotic transients. We present herein the VASCO Citizen Science Project, which can identify unusual candidates driven by three different approaches: hypothesis, exploratory, and machine learning, which is particularly useful for SETI searches. To address the big data challenge, VASCO combines three methods: the Virtual Observatory, user-aided machine learning, and visual inspection through citizen science. Here we demonstrate the citizen science project and its improved candidate selection process, and we 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 15,593 candidate image pairs in the data (ca. 10% of the candidates), and has so far identified 798 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.

A search for transient, monochromatic light from the Galactic plane

“…No optical pulses were detected. However, Villarroel et al 2020, 2022a, 2022b, and Solano et al (2023 have discovered simultaneous, multiple star-like transients, often in alignment, that appear in single snapshots from the Palomar Sky Survey taken in the 1950's. In one case, nine point sources appeared within half an hour within 10 arcmin on a photographic plate taken in 1950, but the sources are absent on previous and later image (Villarroel et al 2021).…”

“…Detecting unresolved broadband optical pulses must discriminate against false alarms such as glints of sunlight off satellites orbiting the Earth, strobe lights on distant aircraft, laser communication and LIDAR from orbiting satellites, and elementary particles hitting the sensor that mimic a star image (Corbett et al 2021, Nir et al 2021, Richmond et al 2020. Villarroel et al (2020Villarroel et al ( , 2021Villarroel et al ( , 2022aVillarroel et al ( , 2022b and Solano et al (2023) have discovered transients, both in alignment and clumped, in pre-Sputnik images from the Palomar Sky Survey. Work is ongoing to identify these interesting candidates.…”

“…Other searches for optical sub-second flashes were performed over a broad band of wavelengths (Horowitz et al 2001, Wright et al 2001Howard et al 2004;Stone et al 2005;Howard et al 2007, Hanna et al 2009, Abeysekara et al 2016, Villarroel et al 2020, 2022a, 2022b, Maire et al 2022, Acharyya et al 2023, Solano et al 2023. Broadband optical searches can detect flashes from both extraterrestrial technology and from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars having a wide range of masses (cf.…”

UAP Research in Germany: Single Case Studies, Data Management, Understanding of “Strangeness”

“…Selbst kurzfristige Manipulationen von Gestirnen oder Galaxien sind denkbar. Sie könnten nachgewiesen werden beim Vergleich von Himmelskatalogen, die inzwischen bereits viele Jahrzehnte abdecken (Vaas, 2022c;Villarroel et al, 2016Villarroel et al, , 2020Villarroel et al, , 2022a.…”