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.
@article{arxiv.2009.10813,
title = {Launching the VASCO citizen science project},
author = {Beatriz Villarroel and Kristiaan Pelckmans and Enrique Solano and Mikael Laaksoharju and Abel Souza and Onyeuwaoma Nnaemeka Dom and Khaoula Laggoune and Jamal Mimouni and Hichem Guergouri and Lars Mattsson and Aurora Lago García and Johan Soodla and Diego Castillo and Matthew E. Shultz and Rubby Aworka and Sébastien Comerón and Stefan Geier and Geoffrey Marcy and Alok C. Gupta and Josefine Bergstedt and Rudolf E. Bär and Bart Buelens and Emilio Enriquez and Christopher K. Mellon and M. Almudena Prieto and Dismas Simiyu Wamalwa and Rafael S. de Souza and Martin J. Ward},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.10813},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
16 pages, 7 figures, contribution to IAC 2020 conference