Stochastic Scribbles
Random musings in a variety of subjects, from science to religion.

Helping Arecibo find binary systems

Einstein@Home is a distributed computing project that has been helping LIGO sift through data from its laser-interferometry based gravitational wave detector. Now it is also sifting through data from the Arecibo radio telescope to search for radio pulsars orbiting around very heavy objects such as another neutron star or even a black hole. It will not only provide more indirect observations for gravitational waves like what was provided by the first binary pulsars discovered, but it will also reveal potential candidates where gravitational waves could be measured directly with gravitational wave observatories.

Einstein@Home runs on top of BOINC, an infrastructure for running distributed computing projects, and there may be other projects using BOINC that catch your interest such as SETI@home.