You can now help scientists discover black holes with this app

Have you ever dreamed of contributing to groundbreaking scientific research? Well, now you can! Thanks to a new citizen science app called Black Hole Finder, you can help astronomers uncover the universe’s most mysterious objects: black holes.

The app developed by the Dutch Black Hole Consortium, is on a mission to find kilonovas – incredibly powerful explosions caused by the collision of a neutron star and a black hole. These events can lead to the birth of new black holes. To spot kilonovas, the consortium uses the BlackGEM array of telescopes in Chile to capture vast swaths of the night sky.

But here’s the challenge: sifting through countless images to identify potential kilonovas is a daunting task, even for computers. That’s where you come in. The Black Hole Finder app presents you with three images at a time and asks you to determine if they show a real celestial object or a false one (like light reflecting off a satellite).

“People are still much better at identifying patterns than our algorithms,” said Radboud University’s Steven Bloemen, project manager of the BlackGEM telescopes. “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.”

Let me remind you that this isn’t the only citizen scientist project. In 2022, Open University and the University of Southampton published a project named Black Hole Hunters. As the name suggests, that one is also about helping scientists identify black holes. There’s also a NASA-funded project, which was conducted in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, devoted to analyzing photos of Jupiter.

Black Hole Finder available in eight languages (Dutch, English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian) on both Apple and Android devices, as well as a web version.

So, if you’ve got a few spare minutes and a passion for space exploration, download the Black Hole Finder app and join the hunt for these cosmic giants. Your contribution could be the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.

[via Space.com; Image credits: NASA]