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UWM's worldwide home computer system discovers new collapsed star
By Sarah Perdue of the Journal Sentinel
Aug. 12, 2010 1:32 p.m.
http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/100550429.html#comments
Making an astronomical discovery just became as easy as turning on your computer.
Three volunteers with no formal training in astronomy detected a previously unidentified collapsed star known as a pulsar - or at least their computers did, according to a report published online Thursday in the journal Science.
The volunteers were three of more than a quarter million people who registered their computers to process over 132,000 gigabytes of data collected by astronomers. The computers are part of the larger Einstein@Home project, a program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to identify gravitational waves and pulsars. Volunteers from 192 countries participate in the project.
"As far as I know, this is the first astronomical discovery of something out there that we didn't know before," using volunteer distributed computing, said Bruce Allen, the leader of Einstein@Home, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and adjunct professor of physics at UWM.
Pulsars are collapsed, spinning stars that can emit a beam of light or radiowaves. They weigh as much as a star but are typically less than 10 kilometers in diameter. In comparison, our sun is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter.
"Pulsars are neat because they have the strongest gravity in the universe, apart from black holes," Allen said. "They're like a playground to study what happens when gravity becomes very strong."
Researchers from more than 20 universities and observatories around the world, including UWM, have been collecting data at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which hosts the largest radiotelescope and detects pulsar beams.
While the scope of the project is large, the time and effort needed by volunteers is small.
"It takes two minutes," Allen said. "You download a piece of software, install it and make up a user name and password."
Once installed, Einstein@Home downloads data, mines through it and identifies candidate pulsars with no additional input from users. The software operates on registered computers only when they are idle.
Allen set up Einstein@Home at UWM in 2005 with the primary goal of detecting gravitational waves, which are a yet-undetected prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. There are, however, more than 2,000 pulsars that have been identified since the discovery of the first one in 1967.
In March 2009, about a third of the data being downloaded to Einstein@Home computers began to include the pulsar data, and 120 known pulsars have been redetected by volunteers' computers to date.
On July 11, 2010, a computer in Ames, Iowa, identified what was suspected to be a novel pulsar. The candidate was reconfirmed three days later on a computer in Germany. Researchers spent the following weeks validating the discovery.
"After five years of running Einstein@Home, I was starting to think this was kind of hopeless," Allen said. He added that data is continuously being analyzed and he does not expect the discoveries to end with this pulsar.
Chris Colvin, who with his wife, Helen, own the first computer that made the discovery, said the software makes no indication a pulsar has been identified in the data.
After Allen contacted the Colvins, Chris said, "I remember I was like, holy cow, they found something."
The Colvins are acknowledged in the report and will receive a plaque. "To just be associated with something like this is really neat," Chris Colvin said.
It is the aggregate power of the volunteers' computers that makes searching through the data in a timely fashion even possible. There are currently over 50 ongoing projects, ranging from the search for extraterrestrial life to predicting how a protein takes its shape, that use software called BOINC that was developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002.
According to David Anderson, director of BOINC, the computing power provided by volunteers is nearly twice that of the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
"I think that the significance is that a lot of times when we're doing searches for pulsars like this, we're limited in what we can do by the amount of computing power that we have," said Paul Ray, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory who was not involved with the report.
While detecting gravitational waves remains a goal of astronomy research, Ray said their discovery is likely many years away.
"They're making great use of the computer time that they have by doing some other things, one of which is these radiopulsar searches," he added.
UWM's worldwide home computer system discovers new collapsed star
By Sarah Perdue of the Journal Sentinel
Aug. 12, 2010 1:32 p.m.
http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/100550429.html#comments
Making an astronomical discovery just became as easy as turning on your computer.
Three volunteers with no formal training in astronomy detected a previously unidentified collapsed star known as a pulsar - or at least their computers did, according to a report published online Thursday in the journal Science.
The volunteers were three of more than a quarter million people who registered their computers to process over 132,000 gigabytes of data collected by astronomers. The computers are part of the larger Einstein@Home project, a program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to identify gravitational waves and pulsars. Volunteers from 192 countries participate in the project.
"As far as I know, this is the first astronomical discovery of something out there that we didn't know before," using volunteer distributed computing, said Bruce Allen, the leader of Einstein@Home, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and adjunct professor of physics at UWM.
Pulsars are collapsed, spinning stars that can emit a beam of light or radiowaves. They weigh as much as a star but are typically less than 10 kilometers in diameter. In comparison, our sun is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter.
"Pulsars are neat because they have the strongest gravity in the universe, apart from black holes," Allen said. "They're like a playground to study what happens when gravity becomes very strong."
Researchers from more than 20 universities and observatories around the world, including UWM, have been collecting data at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which hosts the largest radiotelescope and detects pulsar beams.
While the scope of the project is large, the time and effort needed by volunteers is small.
"It takes two minutes," Allen said. "You download a piece of software, install it and make up a user name and password."
Once installed, Einstein@Home downloads data, mines through it and identifies candidate pulsars with no additional input from users. The software operates on registered computers only when they are idle.
Allen set up Einstein@Home at UWM in 2005 with the primary goal of detecting gravitational waves, which are a yet-undetected prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. There are, however, more than 2,000 pulsars that have been identified since the discovery of the first one in 1967.
In March 2009, about a third of the data being downloaded to Einstein@Home computers began to include the pulsar data, and 120 known pulsars have been redetected by volunteers' computers to date.
On July 11, 2010, a computer in Ames, Iowa, identified what was suspected to be a novel pulsar. The candidate was reconfirmed three days later on a computer in Germany. Researchers spent the following weeks validating the discovery.
"After five years of running Einstein@Home, I was starting to think this was kind of hopeless," Allen said. He added that data is continuously being analyzed and he does not expect the discoveries to end with this pulsar.
Chris Colvin, who with his wife, Helen, own the first computer that made the discovery, said the software makes no indication a pulsar has been identified in the data.
After Allen contacted the Colvins, Chris said, "I remember I was like, holy cow, they found something."
The Colvins are acknowledged in the report and will receive a plaque. "To just be associated with something like this is really neat," Chris Colvin said.
It is the aggregate power of the volunteers' computers that makes searching through the data in a timely fashion even possible. There are currently over 50 ongoing projects, ranging from the search for extraterrestrial life to predicting how a protein takes its shape, that use software called BOINC that was developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002.
According to David Anderson, director of BOINC, the computing power provided by volunteers is nearly twice that of the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
"I think that the significance is that a lot of times when we're doing searches for pulsars like this, we're limited in what we can do by the amount of computing power that we have," said Paul Ray, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory who was not involved with the report.
While detecting gravitational waves remains a goal of astronomy research, Ray said their discovery is likely many years away.
"They're making great use of the computer time that they have by doing some other things, one of which is these radiopulsar searches," he added.
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