Help scientists find new black holes with this free smartphone app

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Posted: Sept. 6, 2024 By: Jatan Mehta Category: Black Holes
I'm sitting on a plane staring at three grainy black-and-white images on my phone. "Real or bogus," I mutter to myself. Real, I decide, and move on to the next trio. I'm on the hunt for newly formed black holes, using the new citizen science app Black Hole Finder. Developed by the Dutch Black Hole Consortium, the mobile app allows members of the public to help the consortium sort through thousands of images to identify potential targets of interest. Ultimately, 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 create a stellar-mass black hole. To search for kilonovas, the consortium uses the BlackGEM array of telescopes in Northern Chile to image wide swaths of the night sky looking for these bright, but very short-lived, explosions. Their light may only be visible to us for a few days. Now, here's the problem — some of these images show real stellar sources, while others show false ones, such as light bouncing off a communications satellite. While AI filters can help weed out some of the false sources, they can't catch everything. That's why the Dutch Black Hole Consortium is turning to the public for help through the Black Hole Finder app.
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