Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

[John J.]

The million-dollar question has never been whether the objects are present on the plates.

I do sort of wonder whether the features on the reproduced images of the plates identified as transients by Solano, Villarroel et al. are actually all present on the original plates, and if some methodological error or reprographic process might have caused an under-representation of such features within Earth's shadow (or an over representation elsewhere) when studying the reproduced images.

 

[JMartJr]

I've always favored the intermittent spouting of space whales, myself.

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

 

[jdog]

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

Add Doctor Who and Pinocchio in Space...

 

[John J.]

I've always favored the intermittent spouting of space whales, myself.

Reference to:
1) Star Trek
2) Star Wars
3) Futurama
4) Avatar sequels
5) other?

6) Unfortunate but apparently happy whale brought into existence by Heart of Gold's infinite improbability drive, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
7) Star Whale in Doctor Who, "new" series 5 ep. 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_Below

Edited to add (8) Extraterrestrial whale in 2000 AD's strip Damnation Station. Encountered in an ocean of an alien planet, but implied to have travelled there from outside our galaxy. The premise of the strip is that a powerful ET civilization in our galaxy, The Host, tolerates our existence as long as (often unwilling or unbalanced) human combatants hunt down and destroy any species entering the galaxy from outside. Dark stuff.

 

[NorCal Dave]

One thing I find rather curious is her claim that "the objects are there and look exactly as they do in the digital images." Well… yes. Has anyone seriously argued otherwise?

Isn't this a response to the Hambly & Blair paper? They suggest some of the transients could be from the digitizing process, something they were actually involved with. At the very least, one would need to eliminate those transients that appear in digital formats, but not on the original plates.

Maybe a bit of a Strawman argument? The basic push back on all of these studies is there are a number of things that could have caused these transients that should be eliminated before going to aliens. Obviously, if a transient is an emulsion defect on the original plate, it would still "look exactly as they do in the digital images" but be useless when trying to correlate aliens being interested in nuclear tests.

 

[Andreas]

Obviously, if a transient is an emulsion defect on the original plate, it would still "look exactly as they do in the digital images" but be useless when trying to correlate aliens being interested in nuclear tests.

Indeed. It will be very interesting to read the upcoming report. One can only hope that it provides a detailed account of how the plates were examined to determine whether the transients were caused by defects. To be honest, however, I suspect that the conclusions will remain open to interpretation.

 

[HoaxEye]

You flagged the right strengths: ML-filtered search, Monte Carlo nulls, etc..

Provenance: yes, the paper doesn't confirm individual objects on the original emulsion. It never claimed to. It's a statistics paper on the high-confidence subset, scoped that way in plain text, with Hambly & Blair cited. That caveat applies to every analysis on the digitized POSS-I material, not to alignments specifically. "Provenance is open, therefore the pattern is fake" is a category error you'd flag in anyone else's argument.

Geography: The longitude clustering is partly geometry, north/south alignments on tracked plates plus Palomar's zenith bias. It's flagged as suggestive. Arguing it isn't a hit, it's agreeing with the caveat.

The part nobody wants to touch is the ecliptic depletion. That's the actual result. Thats the strongest part of the paper.

I don't think that's a category error. "Open provenance" doesn't make the pattern fake by definition. It limits how far the interpretation can be pushed. That matters, because the paper does not stop at "interesting structure in the catalogue" but goes on to discuss geosynchronous altitude, fixed meridians, Hanford, and SAC, even while noting that the longitude effect is partly geometric on sidereally tracked plates.

I also think there's a broader tone issue: the wording tends to sound more settled than the actual evidential position. This paper's title itself is stronger than what the full text warrants once the caveats and correction schemes are read closely.

Yes, the ecliptic depletion is probably the strongest internal result in the paper. What I don't think follows is the stronger claim that this makes the effect robust against photographic/instrumental artefacts in general: the result is still about an ML-selected subset of a copy-derived POSS-I catalogue, not a validation on the original negative.