(30-09) Potential new black hole candidate identified by citizen scientists. View Transient 147284677 report
(14-09) Potential new black hole candidate identified by citizen scientists. View Transient 126588449 report
The Dutch Black Hole Consortium has launched the Black Hole Finder app. Citizens worldwide can now help identify newly formed black holes, contributing to groundbreaking astronomical research.
Available in 8 languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian. More languages to follow soon
Help astronomers identify potential kilonovas and distinguish them from false signals.
Access data from the BlackGEM telescope array just 15 minutes after observation.
Power users with over 1000 classifications can request follow-up observations using the LCO network of telescopes.
Your classifications contribute to training advanced AI/ML models for automated black hole detection.
See the BlackGEM telescope in action! This image updates regularly to show you the current view.
We wanted to give you something back by showing the resulting image from the follow up you requested.
For all your classification and theory questions, use the support chat button, it is customized for this app.
Due to the sometimes very high number of transients we have in one night we decided to make things simpler. Everyone who does more than 1000 transients will be granted the Super User status. After that you can help us do a follow up. The follow up process has also been updated. We disabled it a while ago as we were requesting a lot of follow-ups. So many that we ran out of telescope time at LCO.
We now have new telescope time available and based on the brightness of the transient you will request a different follow up. Once you reach Super User status you will receive a notification, the tutorial becomes available for you and you can requests follow-ups for transients that are less than 16 hours old.
A few days ago one of the belts necessary to open and close the dome broke. Luckily, the other belt functioned well so the dome was closed. However, that telescope will not be observing until the broken belt has been replaced. The reason the belt broke was that it had to operate under an angle. This will be fixed as well. The plan is that all will be working again in a week.
As you might have noticed, we haven't had a lot of new transients coming in lately. This is because we are currently working on generating a new reference image dataset. So far we have been using the reference images from another telescope, but because the BlackGEM telescopes are much more sensitive, this resulted in a lot of false positives. Additionally we have had a lot of bad weather lately, which also prevented us from observing.
Due to the very large numbers of transients we are still getting every day, we have to switch our backend database to a new format. This means that in the upcoming month we will slowly transition to the new database. Because we cannot force users to update to the app it's possible that you will lose some of your classifications in the transition. Classifications made in the old app will no longer be fetched in the new daatabase format. We recommend to change to the new app as soon as possible.
We have switched to a new way to send your classification answers to the machine learning model. This means that improving the model will be more dynamic and hopefully we can improve the model faster. We are still working on the model and we will keep you updated on the progress. In the future we hope to provide you with feedback how well you have classified transients.
We have released a new version of the app. Data is now stored on a monthly basis so that every user has a new chance every month to compete in the ranking. Also, for users it's possible now to keep track of your monthly progress. Finally we have added an overview page where you can see some project statistics. Do note that we have also actively started cleaning up the data. For now we will delete all data that is older than 3 months.
