at work today · A portrait
An astronomer at Nordita leads VASCO, a project comparing century-old sky photographs to modern surveys, and has reported point-like objects present in one exposure and gone in the next, unexplained so far.
The line above is how her claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
She led the VASCO project's first paper, published in The Astronomical Journal, comparing a 1950s sky catalogue to modern surveys and reporting about 100 previously catalogued stars no longer visible, including one followed up directly with telescope time.
A peer-reviewed paper in Scientific Reports described dozens of aligned "multiple transients," several point-like flashes appearing together in one exposure, unexplained by any known object or process at the time of the plates.
Astronomers Hambly and Blair, in RAS Techniques and Instruments, argued the reported transients are more likely flaws in the photographic emulsion, pointing to profiles narrower than ordinary stars. Villarroel's team disputed the comparison as circular.
Villarroel's team published companion papers proposing some transients could be glints from objects near Earth, reporting a statistical link between transient counts and nuclear weapons tests and reports of unidentified phenomena.
Astronomer Wesley Watters and colleagues, in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, published a peer-reviewed critique arguing the statistical case for a nuclear-test link doesn't hold up. Villarroel's team answered in a 2026 preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.