Help scientists find new black holes with this free smartphone app

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

Using the app is very simple: You take a look at three images and decide whether or not the image shows a real source or a false one (or, you can select "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 app is available in eight languages (Dutch, English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian) across both Apple and Android devices. There's also a web version available to those using a computer. So if you have a few minutes of spare time each day, consider downloading the app and giving the Dutch Black Hole Consortium a helping hand in exploring the vast cosmos.