2024-08-21 18:38:31
A new mobile app developed by the Dutch Black Hole Consortium allows anyone to help search for black holes.
The Dutch Black Hole Consortium is looking for kilobytes—powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiation created by the merger of a neutron star and a black hole. A kilonova, in turn, can create a black hole with the mass of a star.
To search for kilonovae, the consortium used the BlackGEM telescope array in northern Chile to image wide swathes of the night sky in search of these bright but very short-lived explosions. Their light can only be visible to us for a few days.
Here’s the problem—some of these images show real star sources, while others show spurious ones, such as light reflected from a communications satellite. While AI-based filters can help weed out some of the fake sources, they can’t catch everything. The Dutch Black Hole Consortium is therefore asking the public for help via the Black Hole Finder app.
“Humans are still much better at recognizing patterns than our algorithms,” Radboud University’s Steven Bloemen, project leader of the BlackGEM telescopes, said in an emailed statement. “By using the app, citizens around the world can help train our AI algorithms to distinguish between real and fake sources and more quickly detect the most interesting candidate sources.”
Using the app is very simple: You look at three images and decide whether the image shows a real source or a fake (or you can choose “unknown” if you’re not sure).
Of course, the app teaches you all the factors you need to consider to make that determination. And that’s it!
The Black Hole Finder application is available in eight languages (Dutch, English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish and Italian) for Apple and Android devices, writes dir.bg.
There is also a web version available for those using a computer. So if you have a few spare minutes a day, consider downloading the app and helping the Dutch Black Hole Consortium explore the vastness of space.