Monday, August 15, 2011

More new pulsars

In July, the Einstein@Home project discovered two more radio pulsars using the Arecibo data. With their first discovery occuring on August 10, 2010, that means six in the first year-impressive, since they are looking for something around 10 miles across, located many light-years away.

Their site is http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/, and you should check into it-by using unused processor time on personal computers, and currently around 60,000 volunteers are providing nearly 300 terraflops of computing power, making the E@H "machine" one of the fastest computers in the world.

In addition to the pulsar searches, they are also monitoring an array of gravity wave detectors. Since pulsars are one of the few things that theorists say should produce gravity waves, the pulsar search is logical. The confirmation of Einstein's predictions about gravity waves would be a massively important discovery, at least to physicists-it may not affect our lives any time soon, but who know-eventually they could be used to find your keys or help you remember what you just walked into the kitchen for...

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