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You can take part in the search through Zooniverse’s Black Hole Hunters project, where volunteers classify candidate signals in stellar brightness data. You do not need astronomy experience or a telescope. The project is looking for clues to stellar-mass black holes paired with stars—not announcing that a new black hole has already been found.
What you’ll do as a volunteer
Black Hole Hunters is a citizen-science project hosted on Zooniverse. Its project page offers a “Get Started” route, along with classification and discussion areas. The task described is to inspect signals from stars observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and help identify patterns that might merit further investigation.
The project page lists its launch date as October 26, 2021. An October 2026 IFLScience article describes the effort and its search, but that date does not mean the project itself began in 2026.
The IFLScience article says volunteers need no astronomy background and quotes project leader Dr. Adam McMaster describing the process as showing participants examples of what to look for. The current project tutorial is the place to learn the task’s specific classification steps; the article does not provide a detailed classification rubric. Participation means reviewing supplied survey data, not observing stars yourself.
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What kind of black hole is the project seeking?
The target is a stellar-mass black hole in a relatively wide binary with a companion star. Unlike a black hole actively drawing gas from a nearby star, a non-interacting black hole may produce no bright X-ray signal that makes it easy to spot. It can therefore be difficult to detect by ordinary direct observation.
This is not a search for Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It is a search for stellar-mass black holes and possible stellar companions elsewhere in our galaxy.
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How self-lensing can reveal an otherwise hidden object
In a binary system, the black hole and its companion star orbit one another. At some points in that orbit, the compact object can pass in front of the star from our viewpoint. Its gravity bends and magnifies the star’s light—a phenomenon called self-lensing. As the orbital geometry repeats, the magnification can produce recurring changes in the star’s apparent brightness.
That is different from finding an interacting binary through the glow of material falling toward a black hole. Other searches can also use a black hole’s influence on a companion’s motion. Black Hole Hunters’ distinctive clue is a possible self-lensing pattern in a star’s light curve, its record of brightness over time.
Why people inspect signals selected by AI
According to IFLScience’s October 2, 2026 article, a neural network screened 15 million stellar light curves and surfaced 1 million candidate signals in one week. Those are candidate signals, not a million black holes. Periodic brightness changes can have other causes, so human review helps assess which patterns warrant attention and follow-up.
A promising classification would not by itself confirm a black hole. Astronomers would need further investigation to establish what produced the signal. McMaster told IFLScience: “We’re hoping to be the first ones to find [a self-lensing system] containing a black hole, but a neutron star will be interesting too!” A neutron star is another compact object that could be relevant to the search.
What the search may—and may not—find
IFLScience reported that about 50 stellar-mass black holes were known in the Milky Way, compared with an estimated population of around 100 million, and gave about 1,600 light-years as the distance to the closest known black hole. These figures are estimates and counts reported by that October 2026 article, not a live census established by the Zooniverse project page.
The same article said five self-lensing systems were known at the time, none containing a black hole. The project team expected TESS data to yield dozens of detections, while noting that many more systems might remain undiscovered. That is a forecast, not a result or a guarantee that volunteers will find a black hole.
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How to get started
- Open the official Black Hole Hunters project page on Zooniverse.
- Select “Get Started” and follow the project’s current tutorial to learn what signal features to classify.
- Review the supplied light-curve candidates and submit classifications through the project interface.
- Use the project’s discussion area if you want to compare observations or ask questions about the task.
The described activity requires no telescope, binoculars, or astrophotography camera: volunteers classify survey data rather than collect observations themselves. The reviewed project information does not specify a particular hardware requirement.
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