A glint in the eye: photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts
Beatriz Villarroel, Lars Mattsson, Hichem Guergouri, Enrique Solano,, Stefan Geier, Onyeuwaoma Nnaemeka Dom, Martin J. Ward

TL;DR
This paper proposes a method to identify potential non-terrestrial artefacts in old photographic plates by detecting multiple transient reflections, helping to set upper limits on reflective debris in geosynchronous Earth orbits.
Contribution
It introduces a statistical approach to distinguish real NTAs from false positives in photographic data, and applies this to historical plates to constrain NTA prevalence.
Findings
Detection of multiple transients indicates potential NTAs with high significance.
Methodology can set upper limits on reflective debris in GEOs.
Statistical analysis reduces false positive identifications.
Abstract
In this paper, we present a simple strategy to identify Non-Terrestrial artefacts \citep[NTAs;][]{Kopparapu} in or near geosynchronous Earth orbits (GEOs). We show that even the small pieces of reflective debris in orbit around the Earth can be identified through searches for multiple transients in old photographic plate material exposed before the launch of first human satellite in 1957. In order to separate between possible false point-like sources on photographic plates from real reflections, we present calculations to quantify the associated probabilities of alignments. We show that in an image with nine "simultaneous transients" at least four or five point sources along a line within a arcmin image box are a strong indicator of NTAs, corresponding to significance levels of to . This given methodology can then be applied to set an upper limit to…
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