Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Astronomers want your help to spot hidden black holes

Georgina Torbet
By

Black holes are some of the most mind-bending objects in the universe. They are so dense that anything which passes their event horizon, even light, can’t escape. That’s where they get their name, as the black hole itself is impossible to see. Fortunately for researchers, many black holes have material like dust and gas around them, and when this material falls into a black hole it can give off bursts of X-rays which allow them to locate the black hole.

But this isn’t the case for every black hole. Some are not taking in material, meaning they don’t give off X-rays and are much harder to locate. Now, a citizen science project is inviting members of the public to help search for these “hidden” black holes.

This simulation of a supermassive black hole shows how it distorts the starry background and captures light, producing a black hole silhouettes.
This simulation of a supermassive black hole shows how it distorts the starry background and captures light, producing black hole silhouettes. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; background, ESA/Gaia/DPAC

The project, called Black Hole Hunters, looks for clues to the location of black holes left behind by their enormous gravity. Because black holes are so dense they have very strong gravity, and this strong gravity warps spacetime. This bends light coming from stars behind them, making that light brighter for a short time.

Related

Citizen scientists are invited to look for these peaks of brightness from stars in graph data. A short tutorial explains what you are looking for in a graph, then you are let loose to help classify graphs that might indicate the presence of a black hole. The data is gathered from 10 years of measurements from the SuperWASP survey, an exoplanet detection project.

Recommended Videos

The project could help astronomers identify important black holes for future study, according to Adam McMaster, one of the co-leads: “I can’t wait to see what we find with the Black Hole Hunters project. The black holes we’re looking for should definitely exist, but none have been found yet. Our search should give us the first hints about how many black holes are quietly orbiting stars, eventually helping us to understand the way such systems form,” he said in a statement.

“Finding them is a huge task and it’s not something we could do alone, so it’s great that anyone with access to the Internet will be able to get involved no matter how much they know about astronomy.”

You can join in the hunt by heading to the Black Hole Hunters project page.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Amateur astronomer spots dwarf galaxy that computers missed
Right in the middle of this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, nestled among a smattering of distant stars and even more distant galaxies, lies the newly discovered dwarf galaxy known as Donatiello II. If you can’t quite discern Donatiello II’s clump of faint stars in this image, then you are in good company. Donatiello II is one of three newly discovered galaxies. All three were missed by an algorithm designed to search astronomical data for potential galaxy candidates. Even the best algorithms have their limitations when it comes to distinguishing very faint galaxies from individual stars and background noise. In such challenging situations, identification must be done the old-fashioned way – by a dedicated human trawling through the data themselves.

As machine learning approaches get more and more sophisticated, they are increasingly used in astronomy for difficult tasks like spotting dim and distant galaxy clusters. It can be tremendously helpful to have computers search through astronomical data to look for particular objects as they can process a huge amount of data -- however, there are some judgments that still require the human touch.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows an object that was spotted by a human even after it had been missed by a computer algorithm. The dwarf galaxy Donatiello II is very faint and hard to pick out from the background behind it, but an amateur astronomer was able to point it out.

Read more
NASA is asking for your help to study exoplanets
Members of the public can help astronomers observe and study the night sky through NASA’s Universe of Learning Exoplanet Watch program.

With new tools like the James Webb Space Telescope, we're discovering more exoplanets than ever and even peering into their atmospheres. Now, NASA is asking for the public's help in learning more about some of the exoplanets that have already been detected in a citizen science program called Exoplanet Watch.

“With Exoplanet Watch you can learn how to observe exoplanets and do data analysis using software that actual NASA scientists use,” said Rob Zellem, the creator of Exoplanet Watch and an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “We’re excited to show more people how exoplanet science is really done.”

Read more
These supermassive black holes are cozying up close together
Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to look deep into the heart of the pair of merging galaxies known as UGC 4211 discovered two black holes growing side by side, just 750 light-years apart. This artist’s conception shows the late-stage galaxy merger and its two central black holes. The binary black holes are the closest together ever observed in multiple wavelengths.

At the center of most galaxies lies a single monster: a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions or even billions of times that of the sun. These lonely beasts typically sit alone in the heart of galaxies, but recent research found two of these monsters nestled close together in the galaxy UGC4211.

The two supermassive black holes originated in two different galaxies which are now merging into one, located relatively close by at a distance of 500 million light-years from Earth. The pair is among the closest black hole binaries ever observed, sitting just 750 light-years apart, and was observed using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Read more