Finding Pulsars with Your Home Computer

Last week the news hit the stands about a pulsar discovered in data being crunched by home computers. This little bit of serendipitous astronomy research was done using a distributed-computing progject program called Einstein@Home.  It’s a distributed data-crunching project that lets people devote duty cycles on their home computers to science research.  The data came from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (the one that keeps getting threatened with closure because some folks consider it unimportant to radio astronomy).

The pulsar, which lies in the direction of the constellation Vulpecula, is about 17,000 light-years away. This spinning husk of a dying star was discovered in data that was crunched by three people — two in Iowa and one in Germany.  That had to pretty exciting to know that one’s computer helped find one of nature’s oddball objects.

Einstein@Home isn’t the only distributed computing project out there.  The grand-daddy of ’em all is SETI@Home, which crunches through signals from several sources to find any possible messages from intelligent life that might be out there messaging us from the cosmos.  But, there are others — and if you’re looking for something to occupy your computer when you’re not busy with it, check ’em out here. There are projects in astronomy, biology, medicine — you name it, there’s a distributed computer project for you.

I spent several years with a computer dedicated to such a distributed project and it felt pretty good to know that my unused duty cycles were going for a good scientific cause. You might get the same good feeling, too — and who knows?  You might help discover something really big!