Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#21

Post by ordinarily »

_alternator_ wrote: post #6

Transient 'objects' after nuclear tests are quite possibly high energy radiation from the tests themselves. Remember these are on film, and the film is likely removed from its protective housing for some time before, during, and after imaging. (And in many cases protective housing wouldn't help anyway.) I get the sense that this topic is popular because "aliens y'all". It's much more likely to be radiation. It's poss…

They're there before the tests though, and potentially more frequent around nuclear testing calendar days. The argument has never been "these only showed up after a nuclear test."

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#23

Post by WalterBright »

shepardrtc wrote: post #20
WalterBright wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens are not plausible.

Why not?

Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#24

Post by WalterBright »

causal wrote: post #19
WalterBright wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens are not plausible.

Agreed, and I don't think you understood my comment.

Perhaps you didn't write what you meant. I read it as we shouldn't think it is obvious that they aren't aliens.

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#25

Post by tastyfreeze »

One of the authors, Beatriz Villarroel, has been interviewed on this topic several times. She has never said "its aliens". She just says its interesting and warrants investigation. She is also a little stunned that nobody has investigated pre-sputnik transients before.

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#26

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #18
causal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not aliens" seems obvious but shouldn't be a basis for dismissing this either. I feel like sometimes we are so determined to dismiss aliens that we accept any plausible alternative too quickly, when there might be something else more interesting that is neither obvious nor aliens.

Aliens are not plausible.

Sorry to bring the bad news.

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#27

Post by ted_dunning »

dd8601fn wrote: post #15
cshimmin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a research physicist I spent a lot of time looking at the effects of ionizing radiation in pictures, although mostly in the context of digital images. The mechanisms are a bit different for photo emulsions, but to me the reason I'd discount radiation is because they're specifically filtering for features that exhibit the expected point spread function (which is a geometric property of the telescope's optic…

> The objects don't appear as streaks, so they are either very, very short flashes (much shorter than 50 min), or they are very far away. Couldn’t be aberrations in equipment, like lenses? Or film development?

As stated in the abstract, the anomalies occur more within a window around a nuclear event.

Re: ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena

#30

Post by doctorpangloss »

_alternator_ wrote: post #6

Transient 'objects' after nuclear tests are quite possibly high energy radiation from the tests themselves. Remember these are on film, and the film is likely removed from its protective housing for some time before, during, and after imaging. (And in many cases protective housing wouldn't help anyway.) I get the sense that this topic is popular because "aliens y'all". It's much more likely to be radiation. It's poss…

no, i think it's worse than that, and it's right in the study: "the nuclear correlation is just a function of which days Palomar was observing on... even that is not statistically significant. It's just noise." - https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...

another POV is the paper is sloppy in the parts that matter

Machine Learning goes both ways. A chatbot is not predisposed to ruin aliens enthusiast's days. It just does what it is told to do, like repro a paper, and it can tell you the problems in some limited, but globally important, objective way, and it did, and the paper has problems, and they're basic.

Post reply on HN