Donate your computer's idle time to Einstein@Home to find gravitational waves and pulsars. Visit our website to join! Toots: O. Behnke (O), B. Knispel (B)
Two blog posts in two days?! I'm going crazy.
This time another blog post about BOINC. I achieved 100 million points in @einsteinathome and for that occasion I give another update on my distributed computing journey. And I'm having another go with Folding@Home
✨ You can make astronomical discoveries without being a researcher 🔭
Join our citizen science project “Einstein@Home: Pulsar Seekers.”
➡️ https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/rsengar/einstein-at-home-pulsar-seekers
All you need is an internet connection, a device with a browser, or the Zooniverse app and you're ready to discover new pulsars.
You will help classify graphical representations of the results of our distributed computing project @einsteinathome.
#CitizenScience #Zooniverse #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Pulsar #NeutronStars
@stfn @collectifission Not quite a kid anymore: As of this year we've already entered our twenties :-) -B
On this day fourteen years ago, on 6 April 2011, the second radio pulsar discovered with @einsteinathome was published.
Our distributed computing project had started almost exactly two years earlier to analyze data from the Arecibo radio telescope with the help of tens of thousands of volunteers.
This second discovery was special: the pulsar orbits the common center of mass with a white dwarf in just 9.4 hours and it belongs to a rare “species”.
ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/191149/einstein-home-detects-unusual-stellar-pair
📄 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/732/1/L1
At the time, it was assumed that this pulsar could be used to observe relativistic effects. This was finally achieved in 2022 after many more observations: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/12/aa44699-22/aa44699-22.html
#CitizenScience #OTD #OnThisDay #pulsar #astronomy #TheoryOfRelativity
🚨 New header picture 🖼️
It shows the two supernova remnants Cassiopeia A (left, in X-rays) and Vela Jr. (right, at radio wavelengths). Both harbor a “central compact object”, a neutron star left behind together with the debris cloud after the supernova.
Researchers from the permanent independent @maxplanckgesellschaft research group “Continuous Gravitational Waves” at @mpi_grav in Hanover, Germany, have been searching for gravitational waves from these central compact objects using the volunteer distributed computing project @einsteinathome.
📄 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09731
The fact that they did not find any gravitational waves indicates that the neutron stars can only be minimally deformed.
ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1188233/digging-deeper-with-einstein-home?c=26149
Images: http://snrcat.physics.umanitoba.ca/SNRrecord.php?id=G111.7m02.1 and http://snrcat.physics.umanitoba.ca/SNRrecord.php?id=G266.2m01.2
#HeaderPicture #supernova #CasA #VelaJr #astrodon #astronomy #NeutronStar
If you want to learn more about our volunteer distributed computing project @einsteinathome, you can read up on our online portal “Einstein Online”:
ℹ️ https://www.einstein-online.info/en/spotlight/eah/
#CitizenScience #GravitationalWaves #pulsars #NeutronStars #astronomy #astrophysics #EinsteinAtHome
On this day 16 years ago, our distributed computing project @einsteinathome began searching for radio pulsars for the first time.
Previously, volunteers were able to donate computing time on their computers to search for gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars (still mysterious remnants of exploded stars).
Starting 24 March 2009, new applications were available that allowed Einstein@Home volunteers to search Arecibo radio telescope data for radio pulsars (special neutron stars) in close binary systems.
#EinsteinAtHome #CitizenScience #pulsars #RadioPulsars #NeutronStar #astronomy #astrophysics #OnThisDay #OTD
Heute vor 16 Jahren begann unser verteiltes Rechenprojekt @einsteinathome erstmals auch nach Radiopulsaren zu suchen.
Zuvor konnten die Freiwilligen Rechenzeit auf ihren Computern spenden und diese für die Suche nach Gravitationswellen von rotierenden Neutronensternen (immer noch rätselhaften Überresten von explodierten Sternen) einsetzen.
Ab dem 24. März 2009 gab es neue Anwendungen, mit denen die Einstein@Home-Freiwilligen Daten des Arecibo-Radioteleskops nach Radiopulsaren (besonderen Neutronensternen) in engen Doppelsternsystemen durchsuchen konnten.
#EinsteinAtHome #CitizenScience #Pulsare #Radiopulsare #Neutronenstern #Astronomie #Astrophysik #OnThisDay #OTD
While we are following up these candidates feel free to continue to classify the MeerKAT data that [a colleague] is currently analysing and uploading to improve your chance of finding pulsars!
Thank you once again for your incredible contributions. We couldn’t do this without you!
With gratitude and appreciation,
Alexandra & the @mpi_grav Pulsar group @team
Posted on https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/rsengar/einstein-at-home-pulsar-seekers/talk/6739/3614423
5/5 -B
Because our survey is so comprehensive the false positives caused by noise fluctuations can contribute significantly to this list.
Our plan is to confirm the most promising candidates through follow-up observation proposals. This is a lengthy process, so please bear with us. The less obvious candidates will be further examined through automated targeted searches in public FAST data.
(…)
4/
Despite our best efforts to clean the data, some of you have come across real pulsar signals — in the form of very bright known pulsars harmonics (around 10% of the candidates). This still leaves us with well over 4000 candidates we want to follow up and confirm. Since the detection statistic for these candidates isn't extremely high, a second observation/detection is needed to confirm their astrophysical (pulsar) origin.
3/
I’m happy to share that you've done an outstanding job, and let me tell you why: I only encountered one image showing radio frequency interference (RFI), which is typically our biggest source of false positives, second only to random noise fluctuations. This level of accuracy is something that machine learning does not have the capability to achieve (as of yet)!
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📣 Update from our Zooniverse Project “Einstein@Home: Pulsar Seekers” 📣
Dear Volunteers!
I'm writing this post to thank you for your dedication! YOU have acheived millions of classifications for the 282969 Arecibo Pulsar-ALFA (PALFA) survey candidates , as well as for the other candidates we're currently examining in the MeerKAT data.
I’ve personally reviewed the almost 6000 PALFA candidates that you marked as very likely to be pulsars. 1/🧵
On this day seven years ago, an international research team (led by @mpi_grav and @MPIfR_Bonn) published the first millisecond pulsar flashing only in gamma rays.
The discovery was possible thanks to the volunteer distributed computing project @einsteinathome, which the researchers used to find many more gamma-ray pulsars.
Millisecond pulsars are neutron stars – remnants of stellar explosions about 20 km in size with strong magnetic fields – that spin many hundreds of times per second around their axis.
Prior to this discovery, all millisecond pulsars observed in gamma rays also emitted radio waves. The newly discovered “PSR J1744-7619” (rotating 213 times per second) is the first known exception.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao7228 [Open Access]
#Astronomy #Astrophysics #Pulsar #NeutronStar #GammaRays #OTD
The project has resulted in 38 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals, and has also played a role in a dozen PhD theses.
A big thank you to everyone involved!
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home
Join the discussion at https://einsteinathome.org/de/content/einsteinhome-twenty-years-old-today
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Since that time, almost half a million people have contributed computing power to Einstein@Home. Einstein@Home carries out the most sensitive searches for continuous gravitational waves, and continues to set the tightest and most stringent limits on this yet-to-be-discovered population. We have discovered more than 90 new radio and gamma ray pulsars, including a number of extreme and exotic examples.
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A message from Bruce Allen, director of Einstein@Home:
I want to congratulate all of our Einstein@Home volunteers, developers, and scientists: our project is 20 years old today. We officially launched Einstein@Home on February 19th 2005, exactly 20 years ago, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC.
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🥳 Happy 20th birthday, Einstein@Home! 🎉
The distributed volunteer computing project was launched on this day in 2005.
Since the launch of @einsteinathome on 19 February 2005, nearly half a million participants from around the world have donated idle computing time on their PCs and smartphones to search for astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars – small, massive, and exotic remnants of exploded stars.
Einstein@Home is one of the world’s largest volunteer computing projects and a scientific success story: It has discovered more than 90 new neutron stars, some of them very unusual, through their radio and gamma-ray pulsations. It is also conducting some of the most sensitive searches for continuous gravitational waves from unknown neutron stars in @LIGO data. Finding the elusive waves would provide a new astronomical tool for studying extreme gravity and matter and fundamental physics.
ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1226437/happy-20th-birthday-einstein-home
➡️ Join the fun at https://einsteinathome.org/join
#20YearsOfEinsteinAtHome #OnThisDay #OTD #CitizenScience #DistributedComputing #NeutronStars #GravitationalWaves #Pulsars
@bones0 Thank you for your support! Fingers crossed that your rig makes a discovery! -B
Alexandra Botnariuc is a PhD student in the “Pulsars” group.
She is looking for new pulsars, i.e. rotating very compact remnants of exploded stars which are “visible” because of their pulsed radio emission. One of the first things she has worked on was reducing the number of signal candidates from a search for binary radio pulsars on our distributed volunteer computing project @einsteinathome.
https://www.aei.mpg.de/880882/alexandra-botnariuc
#IDWGS #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #Physics #PhD #Pulsars #Research #Hannover
