(Inside Science) — If you have a computer and a few spare moments, you can help search the cosmos for an elusive breed of black hole that astronomers once thought didn’t exist.
Black holes come in two main types: stellar-mass black holes, which generally have about 10-24 times the mass of our sun, and the much heavier variant known as supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times more massive. But astronomers have also found a handful of so-called intermediate-mass black holes that fall between the two extremes.
Now a group from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is calling on the public to help detect more of these rare in-betweeners, which could yield insights into how the more common supermassive black holes form.
Volunteers simply need a computer with internet access and a mouse. After a brief tutorial on the project website, they are shown photos of ...
