The Einstein@Home radio pulsar search screensaver.
Credit: Einstein@Home/AEI Hannover
SYDNEY: Three 'citizen scientists' of the Einstein@Home network have discovered a new radio pulsar.
This is the first genuine astronomical discovery by a public volunteer distributed computing project, demonstrating the great potential of such an unusual form of data processing.
"It proves that public participation can discover new things in our universe," head of the Einstein@Home project, Bruce Allen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in a statement to the press. "I hope it inspires more people to join us to help find other secrets hidden in the data."
The search for gravitational waves
For the past five years, Einstein@Home has used the idle time of the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries (taking the place of a screensaver) to search for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars (super-massive collapsed stars), also called pulsars.
Gravitational waves are a still-unproven phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, which this volunteer network searches to discover.
Last year, it began a search for radio pulsars - neutron stars with immensely strong magnetic fields. Volunteers Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, U.S.A., and Daniel Gebhardt of the Universität Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany, were the first to make the deep-space discovery.
Vulpecula a crucial constellation
The newly discovered radio pulsar (PSR J2007+2722) is located in the Milky Way, approximately 17,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula - where, coincidentally, the first-ever radio pulsar was discovered in 1967.
Astronomers consider PSR J2007+2722 especially interesting since it is likely of an unusual type called a 'disrupted recycled pulsar' (DRPs).
DRPs are a type of pulsar left when a star which began life as one of a binary pair goes supernova but does not repel its companion in the explosion, siphons off some of its companion's excess matter to power its faltering spin, but loses its companion when said star's eventual supernova pushes it away.
However, they cannot rule out that it may be a young pulsar born with a lower-than-usual magnetic field.
