Most Likely Explanation Something Flat and Reflective in Orbit

because they found so many narrower things on the plate. Of course, a number of objects, you can't say that if it's 10 of them, or if it's 500, that just by citing the number, you can't say that it's emulsion defects. Of course, there might be emulsion defects, but they used that it's so many, and there are many that are narrow, that it's most likely emulsion defects. However, there is somebody who actually at the archive looked at them with microscope. If you look at them with microscope, again, these nine or eight out of the nine transients are looking like they're round, they're slightly sharper and rounder, but they look like on the digitized place essentially. How are you going to separate that from transients that are appearing due to flashes? Because you have here a so-called ambiguity, or I mean, it can be either or, because both transients associated with short flashes will produce narrow profiles, as well as hypothetically plate defects. To separate these two, and if you can't do it with a microscope, then you need population statistics. I think that's why the Earth's shadow is so important. Also, one more thing to think about, when we talk about the Earth's shadow, we don't talk about the night side. We mean specifically the geometric shadow at 42,000 kilometers altitude, which is 8.7 degrees. When cosmic rays enter into the atmosphere, they are, I mean, you have all this scattering and you have all the secondary particles. There's absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a deficit, but not outside it. I think that's something very important to remember, that we're not talking about just looking at low Earth orbit, we're talking about this shadow at 42,000. How is any cosmic ray going to remember the geometry there? It's not going to do that because of all the scattering. Only reflections can produce that deficit. I have some questions from my audience as well. Someone named Cyboros says, Beatrice, thank you for your dedicated work, these vanishing objects for the past seven years. Given the pre-Sputnik timing and your assessment that these appear to be reflective or metallic objects rather than stars, what do you consider to be the most likely explanation? Well, I think there's something very flat and very reflective in orbit around the Earth. Now, if I also, because there are different ways how you can view this problem, you can view it as that you have a mix of different phenomena. There might be one population that is reflective, another population that is correlating with cosmic rays, a third one that is anti-correlating with geomagnetic storm activity, or it can be all exactly the same population. For example, Brian Doherty, he wrote a paper and he looks at it and he sees that if you actually focus on the sunlit transients and remove the others, the nuclear correlation gets even stronger, which argues for that it's actually the same population of objects producing the different features. And if I look at that, I'm sorry, but I find it hard not to attribute it to something artificial. And I will be straight, that's what I think. I wasn't born with some political bean, so I will just say it straightly. And also it's even more interesting, he also, Brian Doherty, he does this beautiful machine learning and cleans up the data from all the plate defects. And he sees also that they are avoiding the ecliptic. So obviously they don't behave like your average asteroid. And also in a new paper we are working on, we are seeing that they are all clustering around the equator. And it's even more interesting. In this new paper, we're trying to look at the sizes and all the typical features of the objects, and they are so similar to the objects reported by astronomers today when they look at space trash. It's just that then we see maybe one transient per square degree per hour, and today you have 1.7 per square degree per hour. But it seems to be a very similar type of object, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say other than that. Another question from the audience, could it be like a pulsar that, you know, is a transient pulsar, very bright, flash briefly, and then just is no longer aligned with the Earth anymore? No, it wouldn't be, because I'd have to see groupings of them, and they are synchronized, and that doesn't agree. If I can just speculate, we would have one single example of, let's say, of a triple transient, but we would have all the other transients, but we would have an empty sky, but somewhere we would see three transients at the same time appearing and vanishing. We could be discussing gravitational lensing by a supermassive black hole. That's a possibility if you have one single. Maybe there's a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way we didn't know about, but when you have so many as we do, then you're running into trouble. So then there are people that are a little less, you know, kind of supportive of it, and that is, well, let's go to this recent paper, which I believe is either published or appeared in an archive by Waters at all, and, you know, they talk about the clustering, and they talk about the nuclear test correlation, but they claim this one thing which I found, you know, kind of noteworthy is they talk about what they call data hygiene, that you rely on this data set V, and that skipped some of the scan artifact removal steps, and Waters estimates 91% of those features belong to a set that wasn't distinguished from catalog object. Can you explain what he's claiming, or they're claiming rather, and then what is your response to this? Oh, I'd love to talk about this. This is fun. So the first thing that they do is that they say, if you have plate defects in your sample, you cannot do statistics. You need to have a validated data set, and here I find this super fascinating because, A, I mean, you look in the particle accelerators. It's not like you're going to have all, that when you search for Higgs boson, you only say the Higgs boson and throw away everything else. I mean, statistics, you know you work with dirt samples, but the most important is if your dirt or contamination is somehow dependent on the variable you're testing or not, and of course, we know that defects are not going to be tracking the sun-Earth geometry and follow where is the Earth's shadow. The defects don't know this. They might be assembled on the edges of the plates, but they're not going to be tracking the Earth's shadow, so it actually doesn't matter. That's the first thing. I think there's a confusion today between traditional statistical inference, like statistical, or traditional hypothesis testing with machine learning, like machine learning-based research, where people talk about validated samples and people have started conflating the two. So that's the first thing. The second, we have actually tried to remove all the plate defects, but now it gets even more fun. So Waters used a dataset that was publicly, they didn't email us, they could have sent an email to us and asked about like if this dataset was good or not. They used a sample of 5,000 transients reported in Solano et al. 2022. The problem is that these weren't just normal transients. These were those a dataset created to search specifically for vanishing stars, where a lot of additional criteria were added. Essentially, we did not only look for things that flashed, but one also removed anything that existed in any astronomical catalogue across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which creates a beautiful hole, if I may show you, if screen sharing works. There is this, if you look at the two datasets, there's the original one of 107,000. It has its artifacts, et cetera, but like some stripes, empty stripe, but in general, it's a fairly homogeneous dataset. The sky surveyed by the plates is like all plates in the northern hemisphere are covered. Then you look at the sample used by Waters and