Einstein@Home
Einstein@Home is one of the largest distributed volunteer computing projects in the world with almost half a million participants. Their computers provide a computing power of roughly 7.7 PetaFlop/s. If listed on the Top-500, Einstein@Home would be one of the 105 most powerful computers in the world.
The project
Einstein@Home uses idle computing time donated by volunteers all around the world to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars). The project analyzes data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the MeerKAT radio telescope, the Fermi gamma-ray satellite, as well as archival data from the Arecibo radio telescope.
Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 and an International Year of Astronomy 2009 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations.
Discoveries and research
Einstein@Home volunteers have already discovered more than 90 new neutron stars, and we hope to find many more in the future. Our long-term goal is to make the first direct detection of gravitational-wave emission from spinning neutron stars. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago. In September 2015 gravitational waves from colliding black holes were detected for the first time ever, ushering in a new era in astronomy.
Continuous gravitational waves
Einstein@Home was founded in 2005 and since then has been searching for gravitational-wave signals from rapidly rotating neutron stars in the data from the LIGO and Virgo detectors. Search runs with improving sensitivity provide increasingly better upper limits on the emission of continuous gravitational waves from a Galactic population of neutron stars.
Radio and gamma-ray pulsars
Einstein@Home searches for radio pulsars in binary systems using data from large radio telescopes. This search has discovered 55 previously unknown pulsars. Since 2011, Einstein@Home also analyzes data from the Fermi gamma-ray satellite and has discovered 39 new gamma-ray pulsars. There is also a search for selected gamma-ray pulsars in binary systems which runs on GPUs provided by the project volunteers.
