Black Hole Hunters

“Black Hole Hunters: Searching for hidden black holes”:

Based on what we know about how black holes form, we know the Galaxy should contain millions of stellar-mass black holes. Yet we only know of about 70 of them. Where are all the missing ones and why haven’t we found them yet? In this talk I will explain how we know the galaxy should contain so many black holes, how we’ve managed to detect the ones we’ve already found, and why that is not going to help us to find the rest. I will then present an intriguing new method for finding black holes that we’re currently using to carry out a large-scale search with help from non-expert volunteers on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. Come and find out how you can help us find the Galaxy’s missing black holes!

Our speaker Adam McMaster is an astronomer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton (and recently-completed PhD student at the Open University). His work specialises in the use of citizen science to find rare and interesting things in large astronomical surveys. Currently he is searching for the gravitational microlensing signatures of black holes in data from the TESS satellite.