Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

And that's what you expect from cosmic rays, because cosmic rays are being pushed away from Earth by the magnetic fields in those plasma plumes.

So whenever there is activity from the sun that hits the Earth, you have less cosmic rays arriving at Earth.

That's a well-known, documented, studied phenomena.

They reported that the transient rate is anti-correlated with geomagnetic activity.

So to me, that suggests that maybe at least some of the events that they recorded are cosmic rays because this is the behavior.

This is the signature of cosmic rays.

So to me, that sounds completely reasonable to say, if you find this anti-correlation, you have to worry about the noise from cosmic rays.

And if you ask how many cosmic rays should hit each photographic plate, I did a simple calculation.

It's of the order of tens of thousands

in the period of one hour that the the plate was exposed to the sky and you know so the these hits happen it's not up to debate you can't you know if you hate cosmic rays you don't want to discuss them it will not make them go away there are tens of thousands of hits on each photographic plate by cosmic rays there is no doubt about it question is what are the signatures of those and

Could those be distinguished from real transients?

And of course, that's what needs to be discussed.

And it's not a personal attack.

In fact, I didn't even mention the names of the people involved, Beatriz's name.

We are in very good relationship.

We are on Zoom calls together.

And then people on social media try to...

to incite an argument, a debate, a fight between us.

But all I did was what is very often done in scientific discourse, which is to say, okay, you detected the signal.

How do we know that the signal was not triggered by noise?