With this app you can help scientists find new black holes

Scientists from the Dutch Black Hole Consortium are searching for new black holes. But the task is monumental because the light produced when a black hole forms fades quickly. So they’re asking ordinary people to study images of possible candidates using an app called Black Hole Finder to decide where to point their telescopes.

The images are captured by BlackGEM telescopes in Chile, which, when they detect a gravitational wave, immediately begin scanning the sky for rapidly fading light from kilonovas – bright flashes that occur when two neutron stars merge to form a black hole. The light lasts for a week at most, according to the app, so it’s important to find the most likely candidates quickly. Some things can cause false results, such as communications satellites or “cosmic radiation impacting the detector, reflections, or caused by data processing,” Black Hole Finder’s tutorial says.

The group is using AI to solve this problem, but “humans are much better at recognizing patterns than our algorithms,” said Steven Bloemen, the telescopes’ project manager, in an email to SpaceHe added that the app’s users also help train its algorithms to better “distinguish between real and fake sources” and find possible black holes more quickly.

Black Hole Finder, developed by Pocket Science, is available for both iOS and Android, as well as on the web. It works by presenting you with three star photos – one newly taken, an older reference image of the same point in the night sky, and a combined image showing the difference between the two. You are then asked to decide if it is real or fake, and if you are unsure, select “unknown.”

Participants have the ability to control the telescope by requesting follow-up surveys for transient sources that are less than 16 hours old. You must have identified over 1,000 transient sources to gain “super user” status before you can request a follow-up survey. And the app’s introduction states that participating means you’ll also “get the opportunity to contribute as a co-author to scientific publications.”