There are many ways telescopes are put to work. On one end, there are the amateur instruments with good old-fashioned eyepieces attached. A step up from that are the rigs like mine, where cameras are doing the work. At the other extreme are the big monsters in Hawaii and Chile, which are used by scientists from around the world, often remotely.
A small step below those are the scopes, both optical and radio, that were state-of-the art not long ago, but no longer attract the front-line research (and money that goes with it.) One example is the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It still is in great working order, and these days it is still collecting as much (if not more) data than ever. But it its case, that data sits around waiting for some grad student to take a look.
The Einstein@home project was started at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee was started to study information from gravity wave detectors, which were made to test one of the last unobserved phenomena predicted by Einstein. But they have added to the project, and also analyze data from Arecibo, searching in particular for massive neutron stars, especially those in binary systems (which are more "measurable" because of their effect on their partner star.)
Why is this in a blog about my backyard astronomy? Because their research is done on my home computer. Rather than use expensive and hard-to-fund mainframe time, Einstein@home runs on a cloud of home computers, using my unused CPU time. So while I may be taking astronomical pictures that have nearly no scientific value, my hobby is not all just play-I've helped discover two pulsars as well. In my twisted mind, that makes me a real astronomer too...
The second was announced just a couple of months ago, called J1952+2630. It's roughly 95% of the mass of our own sun, which is unusually heavy-it's only the fifth pulsar discovered in that class-and has a "day" of 1/48th of a second. Yep; something the weight of our sun is spinning 48 times per second. It is likely no more that 14 or 15 miles in diameter. A "preprint" report is available here.
Pulsars are formed when super-massive stars die, when they no longer have any material left that can be part of a fusion reaction. It's the heat of fusion inside a star that holds it up against its own gravity. Run out of fusion, you run out of anything to fight the gravity, and the star collapses in on itself, causing one hell of an explosion. Most of the star's matter is blown into space, but some remains, squeezed by it's own mass into a form of matter unlike anything else, called degenerate matter. Here, the bits that make up atoms are squeezed together, and the density is beyond our imagination-the common analogy is a teaspoon of the stuff weighing the same as a battleship. If the star was massive enough, this squeezed core becomes a neutron star. A bit heavier, and a black hole is formed. A bit smaller, a white dwarf is formed. But since white dwarfs are still made of regular matter, and black holes can't be directly observed, it's the neutron stars that interest scientists. Their formation should cause gravity waves to flutter through the galaxy, and they're observable, and that is why this research group is studying them; if they detect any gravity waves with the detectors, great. But if those waves can be correlated to real objects, even better.
If you're interested in using your computer in real front-line research, look into BOINC, which is the program developed at Berkeley that allows researchers to use computers distributed throughout the world in people's homes. It's a massive resource that is barely tapped right now. I've been part of several projects for some time, and that is how I discovered another pulsar, with nothing but a primitive 8" telescope and a home computer.
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