Meet Black Hole Finder, an app that lets you help scientists explore the universe’s darkest secrets | Technology News
The Dutch Black Hole Consortium, a group of scientists working on finding new black holes, recently unveiled a new app called Black Hole Finder that lets you aid astronomers identify new black holes.
The app is free-to-use and is available on Android and iOS and can also be accessed from a web browser. According to the Black Hole Finder’s Google Play Store listing, the app lets 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 scientists identify potential black holes.
Black Hole Finder shows you images captured by the Chilean telescope array BlackGEM that is tasked with searching the skies for cosmic events called ‘kilonovas’. The developers recently added support for languages like Spanish, German, Chinese, Italian, Polish and Bengali, making it accessible to more users worldwide.
After a quick tutorial, Black Hole Finder will teach you how to distinguish between real, bogus and unknown transients. Once you get past the tutorial, the app will show you images taken by the telescopes just 15 minutes after they were captured.
Black Hole Finder asks users if the transient they are seeing are real or bogus. (Express Photo)
When users determine if the photo they are shown is an actual kilonova or a false positive, the data is passed on to a machine learning system that aims to identify the birth of black holes.
In a statement to Space.com, Steven Bloemen, the project manager of the telescopes 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 identify 1000 transients will be granted the “Super User” status, which will allow them to request follow-up for transients that are less than 16 hours old.
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