A Century of Vanishing Stars - Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, VASCO

Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics who is the brains behind the VASCO project - a study of Vanishing and Appearing Sources During a Century of Observation. The project asked a stunningly simple question - if we compare photographic plates of the cosmos taken in the 1950s with photographs taken in the last few years, would there be much of a difference? To their great surprise, Villarroel and colleagues discovered more than 100,000 mismatches between the two datasets. We talk to her about the missing objects, the art of astronomical observation, how to stay creative in a system that rewards incremental progress, and her ambitious goal of identifying and recovering an extraterrestrial object from within our solar system.

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The VASCO project: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.05068.pdf
Nine Transients: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92162-7
VASCO Citizen Science: https://vasconsite.wordpress.com/ml-blink-2/
Dr. Villarroel on the violin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWLjGWzeTCY & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe31lEoUPsU00:00:00 Go!

#vasco #vanishingstars #astronomy

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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Michael Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.

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