Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[Mick West]

Thanks, everyone, for keeping the discussion largely polite and professional in recent posts. I know it's tempting to wander off into a discussion of motives or more aggressive criticism in a long thread like this. At times, the thread has drifted over the line of the politeness policy.

The PP is there to remove distractions for both casual readers and those directly addressed by the topic. I would appreciate it if people could refrain from snark, jokes, motive speculation, and anything that might be perceived as impolite in public discussions, especially the more technical ones.

 

[John J.]

My personally favored explanation would be some undocumented upper-atmosphere explosion experiment, or perhaps some high-altitude artificial platform producing short flashes.

I guess this can't be ruled out, but I think it's unlikely re. fixed-wing platforms for reasons given in post #794.
A large majority of the POSS-1 plates were developed before possible candidate high-flying aircraft (realistically only U-2, RB-57D) were in service.
Villarroel et al. don't report a much higher incidence of claimed transients in later plates AFAIK.
If aircraft flying at more common altitudes could cause pseudo-transients, it would be a well-understood issue amongst astronomers and Villarroel's findings would be readily explained.

Considering the shape of most balloon envelopes, maybe it's unlikely reflected sunlight would cause a brief flash (and through some of the night even high altitude balloons would be beyond the reach of sunlight). A large program of balloons carrying bright, intermittently used lights over 9 years, coinciding with POSS 1, flying within sight of the Palomar Observatory doesn't seem very likely.

No satellites or spacecraft before 4th October 1957, and very few for some years after (part of the attraction of POSS 1's timeframe for Villarroel et al.). The large number of reported transients across much of the sky probably rules out sub-orbital rockets/ missile tests, and we'd probably be aware of an extensive program using (e.g.) exploding or light-carrying sounding rockets/ high altitude military missiles by now.

 

[yoshy]

They have a new web page https://ghostsintheglass.com/, though.

Is the website gone? I'm getting a 404 error. I previously commented I found the website strange, as I have rarely ever seen a researcher use AI to make a website for themselves like that. Here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250809083941/https://ghostsintheglass.com/

 

[jdog]

Is the website gone? I'm getting a 404 error. I previously commented I found the website strange, as I have rarely ever seen a researcher use AI to make a website for themselves like that. Here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250809083941/https://ghostsintheglass.com/

Entirely possible the site had nothing to do with the authors and was set up by a third party having an LLM digest the paper and a few relevant links and spit out the HTML for a website. There's no ownership listed.

The domain was set up on August 7, 2025; I would guess whoever produced the site only paid for a year's worth of hosting and just let it expire.

Here's the WHOIS lookup information:
https://ghostsintheglass.com/
Name GHOSTSINTHEGLASS.COM
Registry Domain ID3007860146_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registered On 2025-08-07 T04:22:49Z
Expires On 2027-08-07 T04:22:49Z
Updated On 2026-07-15 T13:37:40Z

privacy details redacted, but contact information was at:
Mailing Address: Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik, Capital Region, 101

A location which turns out to be "A Reykjavik building that houses a penis museum and an H&M is also the virtual home to an array of perpetrators of identity theft, ransomware and disinformation." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/business/iceland-online-disinformation-identity-theft.html

 

[yoshy]

A location which turns out to be "A Reykjavik building that houses a penis museum and an H&M is also the virtual home to an array of perpetrators of identity theft, ransomware and disinformation." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/business/iceland-online-disinformation-identity-theft.html

Thank you. I should've known this was the work of the penis museum and H&M in cahoots!