“Wanted: a few hundred thousand computers with a little spare time on their hands.”
That’s the basic job qualification if you (and your personal computer) want to join Einstein@Home, a massive international project that uses donated personal computer time to crunch data for real scientists. The project has been going on for several years.
This week, Einstein@Home announced it will begin to analyze data from a new source: the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It’s not too late to get into the action.
Einstein@Home, based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) — a short drive down I-94 from Astronomy headquarters — and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Germany, is one of the world’s largest public volunteer distributed computing projects. Some 220,000 people in 209 countries have signed up for the project and donated time on their computers to analyzing data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and GEO 600 (in Sarstedt, Germany) for gravitational waves.
Powerful astro-events, like black-hole mergers, should generate ripples in the very fabric of space-time (gravitational waves). Einstein@Home uses the collective number-crunching power of thousands of computers to look for patterns of gravitational waves hiding in data captured by LIGO and GEO 600.
The researchers with Einstein@Home will be searching the Arecibo data for a special type of astronomical odd couple that generates gravitational waves: a spinning neutron star, or pulsar, orbiting a black hole. Both objects spring from the collapse of massive stars.
Previous methods could find such binaries in radio data if they orbited each other every 50 minutes or longer. Using the collective computing power of its volunteers, Einstein@Home will be able to find pairs with orbits as short as 11 minutes.
Many dedicated amateur astronomers contribute to various kinds of research, like the study of variable stars and discovering and tracking asteroids and supernovae. But if stargazing isn’t your thing, here’s a way to do some astronomy by essentially doing nothing.
Well, not exactly. You do have to sign up for Einstein@Home and install some software. The project team expects to spot at least a few new pulsars per year.
To find out how to participate, go to einstein.phys.uwm.edu.