| 1. |
- Villarroel, Beatriz, et al.
(author)
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Launching the VASCO Citizen Science Project
- 2022
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In: Universe. - : MDPI AG. - 2218-1997. ; 8:11, s. 561-
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)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.
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| 2. |
- Villarroel, Beatriz, et al.
(author)
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The Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations Project. I. USNO Objects Missing in Modern Sky Surveys and Follow-up Observations of a "Missing Star"
- 2020
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In: Astronomical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-6256 .- 1538-3881. ; 159:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper we report the current status of a new research program. The primary goal of the "Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" project is to search for vanishing and appearing sources using existing survey data to find examples of exceptional astrophysical transients. The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations. In this first paper we present new, deeper observations of the tentative candidate discovered by Villarroel et al. in 2016. We then perform the first searches for vanishing objects throughout the sky by comparing 600 million objects from the US Naval Observatory Catalogue (USNO) B1.0 down to a limiting magnitude of similar to 20-21 with the recent Pan-STARRS Data Release-1 (DR1) with a limiting magnitude of similar to 23.4. We find about 150,000 preliminary candidates that do not have any Pan-STARRS counterpart within a 30 '' radius. We show that these objects are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects. We visually examine the images for a subset of about 24,000 candidates, superseding the 2016 study with a sample 10 times larger. We find about 100 point sources visible in only one epoch in the red band of the USNO, which may be of interest in searches for strong M-dwarf flares, high-redshift supernovae, or other categories of unidentified red transients.
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