Meet Black Hole Finder, an app that arms you to help scientists explore the cosmos’s darkest secrets

Black Hole Finder capacitates you to join scientists on their quest to find potential black holes across the cosmos. It is a citizen science project accessible around the world.

The Dutch Black Hole Consortium (a group of scientists working on finding new black holes), recently introduced a new app called Black Hole Finder that capacitates you to aid astrophysicists identify new black holes. The app is free-to-use and is available on iOS and Android and can even be accessed from a web browser. According to the Black Hole Finder’s Google Play Store listing, the app allows you “explore the universe and learn more about these mysterious and fascinating objects” by using real data from telescopes and other astronomical sources to help astronomers identify potential black holes.

Black Hole Finder shows you images taken by the Chilean telescope array BlackGEM that is mandated to search the skies for cosmic events called ‘kilonovas’. The developers of late added support for languages like Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, Polish and Bengali, making it accessible to more users worldwide. Post a quick tutorial, Black Hole Finder will educate you how to distinguish between real, fake and unknown transients. Once you get past the tutorial, the app will show you pictures captured by the telescopes just 15 minutes after they were taken.

When users decide if the photo they are presented is an actual kilonova or a false positive, the data is passed on to a machine learning system that aims to detect the birth of black holes. In a statement to Space.com, the project manager of the telescopes, Radboud University’s Steven Bloemen said that “people are much better at identifying patterns than our algorithms” and that user input is helping them make their algorithms better “distinguish between real and false sources.” The app description also states that users who detect 1000 transients will be awarded the “Super User” status, which will let them to request follow-up for transients that are less than 16 hours old.

Basically, the Dutch Black Hole Consortium is looking for kilonovas

Basically, the Dutch Black Hole Consortium is looking for kilonovas (a powerful explosion of electromagnetic radiation created by the merger of a neutron star and a black hole). A kilonova, in turn, can fashion a stellar-mass black hole. To search for kilonovas, the consortium utilizes the BlackGEM array of telescopes in Northern Chile to image wide expanses of the night sky looking for these bright, but very brief, explosions. Their light may only be visible for a few days. Now, here’s the issue — some of these imageries show real stellar sources, while others show wrong ones, such as light bouncing off a communications satellite. While AI filters can aid weed out some of the wrong sources, they can’t catch everything. That’s the reason why the Dutch Black Hole Consortium is turning to the public for assistance through the Black Hole Finder app.

“People are still much better at identifying patterns than our algorithms,” Steven Bloemen said in an emailed statement. “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.”