On the nature of apparent transient sources on the National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey glass copy plates
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We examine critically recent claims for the presence of above-atmosphere optical transients in publicly available digitized scans of Schmidt telescope photographic plate material derived from the National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. We employ the publicly available SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey catalogues to examine statistically the morphology of the sources. We develop a simple, objective, and automated image classification scheme based on a random forest decision tree classifier. We find that the putative transients are likely to be spurious artefacts of the photographic emulsion. We suggest a possible cause of the appearance of these images as resulting from the copying procedure employed to disseminate glass copy survey atlas sets in the era before large-scale digitization programmes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it