Nine Objects, One Plate, Zero Explanation — Until Now | Beatriz Villarroel

[00:00:00]young astronomers and children and and and actually also professional astronomers were going there and looking for the vanishing stars that we were hoping to find.

[00:00:11]And then we had this automated process with a very super like well, very advanced thing that Enrique Solano developed. And both were searching for vanishing stars.

[00:00:22]And so we actually went through something like 600 Yeah, I think something like 600 million objects with the with with the automated analysis that Enrique did.

[00:00:37]We did all that, the whole northern hemisphere and even more.

[00:00:42]And we found zero vanishing stars. I mean, zero.

[00:00:48]And >> The failure, right?

[00:00:49]>> [clears throat] >> Yeah, yeah, I mean, we did report it maybe maybe the super like theoretical astronomers that are believing in failed supernova were not as excited. But instead found all these like thousands and thousands of objects that appear and vanish within a plate exposure. And initially we were thinking, "Okay, maybe it's M dwarf flares.

[00:01:11]Maybe it's some kind of maybe it's optical afterglows to to gamma-ray bursts." And that was the initial thought. So we were writing about all the possibilities. I also I think in 2019, we were also including the SETI possibilities because I had a figure.

[00:01:29]I remember the referee was was telling me to tone down the aliens in the and then I felt compelled to include a to do the opposite of course and I included that picture. [laughter] Figure one with a green little alien in it as one of the possibilities and there the referee gave up and just approved it.

[00:01:51]>> [laughter] >> Well, well, we also included all the other changes, but uh know, it it was very like early for me and >> Mhm.

[00:01:59]>> And then we had this uh I had through this visual wetting wetting of 24,000 candidates alone during 3 months.

[00:02:07]You know, you get crazy after that. I I promise you, it it's it's worth it to get a little um and so I had this table two there and then they were 100 uh like coordinates that I identified as interesting with this uh single images that could have been Anwar flares, whatever.

[00:02:27]And the real interesting thing didn't come in that paper. It came when I decided to look through that table yet one more time and we suddenly discovered that one of these images had nine objects appearing and vanishing at the same time but in a small image and we were like, "What is that?"

[00:02:47]>> Were there segments like if you if you look at a transient or were they all basically the same like there'd be some blurring or smudging? I mean, obviously some things like, you know, we'll talk about cosmic rays later, of course.

[00:02:59]We'll talk about um you know, asteroids and planetary objects and near-Earth objects that do uh come and go perhaps or you know, bolides or meteoroids and things like that. But do What was the characteristic of these transients?

[00:03:14]Let's say let's stipulate that they are, you know, uh some some sort of technology, although obviously we're going to talk about that. It's contested.

[00:03:22]But let's say it was would that have the exact same transient, you know, behavior in a photographic emulsion as it would say in a in a CMOS camera or or or similar advanced camera? What would you What do you actually see? Like what Can you describe them for the people that are listening? What What do they look like?

[00:03:38]>> So what we saw was nine objects that looked just like stars.

[00:03:44]Like any kind of stars in the plates.

[00:03:46]>> Mhm.

[00:03:47]>> And when I manually tried to look at the brightness profile, so what we astronomers do to separate something that is around and is around dirt, because you can have bubbles. You can have plate effects that are around and also are star-like.

[00:04:01]So, what you do is to look at the brightness profile for a star of a certain magnitude and compare to the brightness profile of uh another uh of a real star that you know is real and that is there in multiple catalogs.

[00:04:15]>> And And this camera Sorry to interrupt you, but but the camera has a support for the secondary, right? So, it must have some um diffraction spikes or or some telltale signs for point source function, the point spread function. Uh and what you're saying is that the point spread function looked identical for a for these objects as for uh a true point source like a star, right?

[00:04:35]>> Exactly. So, I just compared and it looked identical and I was comparing to the stars that have similar magnitude.

[00:04:41]So, they just looked identical to me when I was measuring. Now, later we learned that there are some statistical differences, but when you just manually were trying to look at it, then it looks very similar for like if you compare one and one.

[00:04:55]>> What is the new phenomena that you you said you found statistically looks different uh when you examine it statistically, rather?

[00:05:01]>> So, today uh and actually that's thanks to some of the critics. If you if you take a big sample of these transients and you compare to a big sample of the stars, you see that they are slightly, not much, but a little bit sharper and more narrowed the brightness profiles than they are of the real stars. And that fits very well with what happens if you have a very short flash. Because then you you have a a less of time for atmospheric turbulence to disturb the profile. So, then it looks slightly more narrow.

[00:05:35]>> I want to uh just highlight something you just said. Uh you said, "Thanks to my critics." And I I just thought of um where I heard that uh that exact same sentence before, and it was in my conversation with Nobel Prize winner John Mather.

[00:05:51]John Mather won the Nobel Prize for co-leading the COBE Cosmic Background Explorer FIRAS experiment that determined that the CMB is a black body, despite what all my haters and critics and I have my own trolls out there, Beatrice. You You're not the only one who has haters and trolls, okay, my friend? Um so, I have a lot of people that that hate that oh, I just I talk up the Big Bang so much and it's I make up this fact that it's a black body, but it's not It's not a black body. Only can make a black body or metallic hydrogen.

[00:06:18]And there's a lot of nonsense I I have to debunk a lot of times, okay? But uh but but what John Mather and his team found was that the CMB is not only a black body, it's the most perfect black body that you could possibly imagine, signifying of long period of thermal equilibrium with high optical depth and uh uniform absorption and emission. Now, why did he say that? Bec- He told me in the interview I did with him 6 years ago 7 years ago that he was very thankful to his critics. And I've heard that many times actually from the late Ray Weiss at at uh MIT who won the Nobel Prize for LIGO.

[00:06:54]They They say your critics sometimes reveal some of the shortcomings of your argument, and by hearing them, it can make them stronger. Now, obviously, you you can go overboard. You can have people that are malicious, malevolent, and and do things as trolls do, and they're not interested in the light, they're interested in the heat. But I did want to I always like to point out we have a lot of young scientists that listen to this program, Beatrice.

[00:07:17]And I will always love to highlight when a scientist says something that's a particularly important that can help guide the career and the choices and the even the emotions of a scientist as he or she starts off young. So, thank you for that explanation and for being candid, honest, and having the integrity that a good scientist should have. So, I really do appreciate that. And it led you to something even better, you know, than if the critics didn't exist, you know? So, thanks thanks to the critics.

[00:07:42]So, um one of the things that's fascinating to me is that it's kind of, you know, I often have thought about light when I'm when I'm out on the beach with my kids late at night and they're looking at a star and I'll say to them like, "We don't know if that star is still there, you know? It could be gone, right? It could have vanished." Um I like to think