BOINC Einstein@Home Team

Posted by Kevin Holmes at 10:56 on 2010 Aug 13

Hello all. I’ve just joined the Einstein@Home programme which in their own words "is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector. Einstein@Home also searches for radio pulsars in binary systems, using data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico." More information can be found at http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/Einstein@Home used the Berkley Open source Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software which you download to your local PC and analyse and compute data sent from the Einstein@Home project. It can be set up to use your computer during idle times (when it is switched on) and analyses the data in the background. Once each data package is complete it accesses the project site and uploads the results. So far, two users have found a pulsar called PSR J2007+2722. It is a 40.8 Hz isolated pulsar, 17,000 light years distant in the plane of the Galaxy, and is most likely a Disrupted Recycled Pulsar (DRP). If so, it is the fastest DRP yet discovered.I would like to set up a British Astronomical Association team so multiple computers can contribute to the project and the results be shared amongst the team members. If you are interested then please respond and I’ll create the team and post out the information.Regards,Kevin Holmes.