Calling all citizen scientists! Here’s a new opportunity for you to get involved in astronomical research. A project called
Spiral Graph is looking for people to help measure the shapes of spiral arms in galaxies like the one above.
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Here’s the idea. Supermassive black holes lurk in the centers of most galaxies, with bigger galaxies hosting bigger black holes. Astronomers snapped the first photograph of one of these behemoths a couple of months ago. But the origin of supermassive black holes remains a mystery.
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The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. The black hole weighs the equivalent of more than six billions Suns. Our solar system is shown to scale. Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope and xkcd.
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A team of astronomers has found empirical evidence of a correlation between the shape of a galaxy’s spiral arms and the mass of its central black hole. Specifically, galaxies with more tightly wrapped spiral arms have more massive black holes. Using this relation, they hope to identify galaxies that harbor more modest “intermediate mass” black holes that may eventually grow into supermassive ones, providing insights into an earlier stage in the origin and evolution of these enigmatic objects.
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That’s where you come in. The
Spiral Graph team needs to measure the curvature of spiral arms in 6,000 galaxies, like the one below, to identify those most likely to host intermediate-mass black holes. You might think that Artificial Intelligence or other computer learning techniques could do it quickly, but it’s actually quite challenging for computers to do this reliably. “The ability of the human brain to find and process patterns is far superior to any computer,” say the project’s organizers.
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This is your chance to make a real contribution to astronomical research, all from the comfort of your home. If you’d like to know more, just click
here.
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By the way,
Spiral Graph is part of the
Zooniverse, which offers many opportunities for citizen scientists to get involved in diverse research projects, not just astronomy:
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Click
here if you’d like to learn more.
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