A rare isolated pulsar with a very low magnetic field has been discovered through the use of Einstein@Home, a volunteer-computing initiative. The newly-discovered pulsar – called J2007 – is a neutron star that spins on its axis 41 times per second. It’s located in Vulpecula, a constellation 17,000 light years from Earth. Of more than 1,500 known pulsars, only eight are of the disrupted recycled variety like J2007.
That life history surely qualifies as interesting, but the most noteworthy aspect of the newly located pulsar is the way it was discovered. The celestial rarity was located by the personal computer of Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa. The couple owns one of the two computers that spotted the pulsar among the mountains of Aricebo data in mid-June. The third person who discovered the Pulsar is Daniel Gebhardt, who lives in Germany. They are among hundreds of thousands who had lent their idle processor time to Einstein@Home.
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“This is the first time an astronomical object has been discovered by this kind of distributed-computing project,” says Allen, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. “I’m really excited we found something.”
The program is supported with grants from the National Science Foundation, and allows scientists to sift through massive stores of data collected by Arecibo, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.
