Scientific discovery: it’s not strictly for the experts.
Citizen scientists, through the independent pursuit of their passion, can sometimes find themselves having achieved something remarkable, whether it’s a sharp 14-year-old who discovers a supernova or a clever, crafty tinkerer who sends a camera up into space. And as Wired reports, the ranks of the amateur scientist chalk up another victory with the discovery of a pulsar in our own Milky Way galaxy located about 17,000 light years away from Earth.
And what’s more, the finding was made possible through data gathering and computation performed by otherwise idle home computers.
A pulsar is the remnant of a star that has exploded into a supernova and then subsequently collapsed in on itself, leaving a rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. This beam is only detectable to us here on Earth when the spinning body causes the beam to point directly toward at us, resulting in our seeing punctuated bursts of activity that give these bodies their name.
As Wired reports, three citizen scientists made the discovery of the body since named PSR J2007+2722 by use of the distributed computing program Einstein@Home, a network of some 250,000 linked home computers that offer their processing capacity while they would otherwise be idle. In sum, the Einstein@Home network yields 250 teraflops of data processing capacity, which correlates to about one-fourth the capacity of the world’s beefiest single supercomputer.
According to Wired, one computer in Iowa working in tandem with another in Germany crunched the data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico and pinpointed the nature and location of the previously unknown body. Since last year, one-third of the total computational power of the Einsein@Home network has been directed toward the search for pulsars and black holes from the data gathered by Arecibo, the world’s largest and most sensitive telescope of its type. With confirmation of this discovery, Einstien@Home managers aim to ratchet up to half that portion of computation power to Arecibo data processing.
Professional scientists reflect on the finding as boding well for the future role of linked computation such as this, and hailed the particular discovery as exciting and significant. As Wired quotes physicist Bruce Allen from Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Gravitational Physics:
“This is the first time I’ve worked closely with radio astronomers making a discovery It was like watching 5-year-olds tearing Christmas presents. Or like watching someone throw chunks of meat at starving sharks.”
Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons.
