Astronomers have taken a very interesting initiative and introduced an application, known as Black Hole Finder, which can help citizens spot newly-formed black holes.
The app has been launched by the Dutch Black Hole Consortium in eight languages and is now available for citizens to use worldwide. Earlier, it was only available in Dutch and English, but now, the makers have added Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian which has widened the reach of this app.
Space enthusiasts across the world have been appealed to help scientists identify the sources which are interesting and should be followed up, which is known as potential kilonovas.
The first and only kilonova observed was on August 18, 2017, when a brief flash of light led to the merger of two neutron stars. Because of the merger, a stellar-mass black hole was formed.
AI to guide astronomers in determining interesting sources
Because there are many candidate sources, artificial intelligence techniques will be used by the astronomers to decide which of those interesting sources can be ignored.
“People are still much better at identifying patterns than our algorithms. 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,” Steven Bloemen (Radboud University, the Netherlands), project manager of the BlackGEM telescopes said.
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The citizens who will have a track record of spotting real sources can trigger follow-up observations with the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) network of robotic telescopes.
“The LCO director has kindly agreed to allow citizens to trigger their 0.4m telescopes to conduct follow-up observations directly from the app when the user deems this necessary. This will provide information astronomers can use to determine if one of the real events is a kilonova,” added Peter Jonker (Radboud University, the Netherlands), PI of the citizen science app and co-PI of the Dutch Black Hole Consortium.
(With inputs from agencies)
Shambhu Kumar is a science communicator, making complex scientific topics accessible to all. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
