c6828 source association: insufficient evidence under the frozen protocol
The accepted offline unit is finished. Its registered prerequisite gate failed: the consumed catalogue supplied one eligible local reference candidate, where two spatially separated references were required. No new centroid, PSF, difference-source separation or birth fit was performed. Separation of the changing emitter from pre-existing emission remains unestablished. This neither confirms a birth nor proves that the emission comes from one source.
The protocol was committed as 81e82fa4 before measurement readout; implementation
and missingness/geometry controls were committed as efa3b115. The one worker
finished with exit code 0 in 6.53 seconds, returning insufficient_evidence.
The independent verifier also finished with exit code 0. There was no restart,
changed threshold, acquisition, model training or automatic successor.
What passed and what stopped the unit
| Registered requirement | Observed support | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Native intensity, uncertainty and mask inputs | All three channels existed for all 69 selected frames; 207 complete file hashes match the registration | Native pixels were available; display images were not used as photometry |
| Native central support | Producer classified 65/69 frames as usable; three failed the central valid-pixel threshold and one had a clipped target disk | Retain all four failures and their visits |
| Pre/post support | At least three usable frames in pre visits 0, 2, 4, 6 and post visits 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 | The registered minimum of three supported visits per window passed |
| Local reference candidates | 13,905 catalogue rows; 4,442 pass clean-W2/SNR filtering; 87 deterministic positional clusters; only cluster 5 qualifies in the 8–15 arcsec reference annulus with three pre and three post visits | Fewer than two separated candidates: stop before fitting |
| Independent check | 213 complete file hash checks, exact frame selection and independently reconstructed catalogue clusters; 68 independent native central-fraction checks | The terminal control-gate decision is reproduced |
The single reference candidate has catalogue median coordinates (139.6176675, −52.26194615) degrees, 13.800801 arcsec from the target, and 502 retained catalogue observations. It remains a candidate reference: no new PSF/astrometric stability measurement was made. A source at about 20.604099 arcsec appears in the consumed catalogue but is outside the frozen control annulus; the annulus was not expanded after seeing the result.
The catalogue cluster about 0.522131 arcsec from the clump position contains pre and post detections. That is consumed catalogue evidence consistent with the already-known pre-event aperture emission. It does not resolve which blended emitter varies, establish clump membership or exclude every physical birth.
Limits and detector implications
This is a conditional failure of the registered source-association method, not proof that source separation is impossible in every method or data set. The two-reference criterion was frozen to control local position/PSF changes. One candidate reference does not meet that criterion and cannot be silently promoted into a measured pair. Native channel availability alone does not supply the missing astrometric control.
The historical c6828 brightening and incomplete pre-event coverage remain unchanged. No observing gap became a physical non-detection. The native WCS uses FK5 and an obsolete RADECSYS header spelling; inputs were preserved. The numeric coordinate convention was held fixed for this gate; no absolute cross-frame astrometric accuracy is asserted. The verifier rechecked central fractions for the 68 frames with that diagnostic; the producer’s separately flagged clipped disk was not counted as a certified central fraction.
The complete newborn-star detector objective remains unmet. This unit supplied no physical-birth positive labels, source-ownership probabilities or population precision/recall. No separation interval was computed, because the necessary control gate failed. Stop this finite unit. Any further scientific action needs a distinct justified prospective protocol and scope; the failed N20 worker and E29–E160 archive remain closed. Atlas restoration/cancellation and the rejected E155/E121 transfers were not approved by this study’s acceptance and were not attempted.
Evidence and costs
Five targeted controls passed before readout: RA wrapping, rejection of missing contamination flags, rejection of references too close to count as an independent pair, native channel translation/fatal masking, and refusal of misaligned uncertainty WCS. An initial test exposed a pandas missing-boolean incompatibility; it was corrected before the single scientific worker ran.
Worker plus compact evidence used about 120 KiB before this report. No large arrays or images were generated. The 64 MiB output cap and 5 GiB reserve passed. Git snapshots preserve code, protocol and compact evidence; the native survey inputs remain local and hash-bound. These records do not establish an external backup or a published Atlas update.