You Can Classify Images and Help Astronomers Locate New Black Holes
Scientists need people’s help hunting for black holes. The aptly named Black Hole Finder app challenges members of the public with sorting through images to help search for black holes in deep space.
“We are asking for your help to find black holes,” writes the Dutch Black Hole Consortium on the Black Hole Finder website. “This concerns black holes that were created after two neutron stars collided and merged.”
When such an event occurs in space, a gravitational wave is emitted, which can be picked up by specialized detectors. These detectors then generate an alert for astronomers, who rush to point their telescopes at the source of the emission.
As Space explains, scientists are searching for a specific type of black hole — kilonovas. Sometimes called “macronovas,” these explosive, energetic events occur when either two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge. The event can create a stellar-mass black hole.
The Dutch Black Hole Consortium uses the BlackGEM array of optical telescopes in northern Chile. The array comprises three telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla complex.
These telescopes can cover a large patch of night sky and, if the conditions are right and astronomers are quick enough, view the light from a kilonova event.
“These telescopes are quickly deployed are the detection of a gravitational wave from a merger of two neutron stars,” says the Black Hole Finder app. “Speed is important, because the light signal of a kilonova is only visible for a few days — a week at most.”
The gravitational wave detectors can only provide scientists with a general location to search for the light signal, so the telescopes must actively hunt while there’s still hope of seeing the event.
Beyond the challenge of time and observational conditions, the latter of which is overcome in large part by the very clear skies in Chile, there is also the issue of false light sources. The team can use artificial intelligence to help sort through all the images, but the AI can’t quite match the effectiveness of people.
“People are still much better at identifying patterns than our algorithms,” explains Steven Bloemen from Radboud University. Bloemen is the project manager of the BlackGEM telescope array. “By using the app, citizens across the world can help train our AI algorithms to distinguish between real and false sources and pinpoint the most interesting candidate sources more quickly.”
The app is free to download and use. Following a short training tutorial, citizen scientists can create an account and get to work. While anonymous work is also allowed, if someone contributes under their name, they may be eligible for a leaderboard. They could even become a co-authors of a future scientific research paper.
“You will learn a lot about the Universe and the unexpected and short-lived phenomena that transpire in it,” the Black Hole Finder team adds.
Complete information on the citizen science program is available on the Black Hole Finder website, and the app is available to download for free from the Apple App Store. So far, users have performed more than 870,000 classifications.
Image credits: Black Hole Finder