Citizen Scientists

“Three volunteers running the distributed computing program Einstein@Home have discovered a new pulsar in the data from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope.” Wired Science reports that: “While your computer is running idle, it could be finding new pulsars and black holes in deep space. … Einstein@Home has been searching for gravitational waves in the data from the US LIGO Observatory since 2005, and since March 2009 has dedicated one-third of its power to searching for radio pulsars and black holes in the Arecibo data. As of this week, it will start dedicating half of its processing power to data from Arecibo, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.”