We are delighted to announce that Einstein@Home has made its first discovery: a radio pulsar, found in data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Details are available in a paper published online by Science today. Science has given us permission to post a copy of the abstract and paper here. They are also on the Science website here. The manuscript is also in the arXiv preprint archive (use the PDF link in the top right corner).

A press-conference webcast about this first discovery is also available.

The name of the pulsar is PSR J2007+2722. It is a 40.8 Hz isolated pulsar, 17,000 light years distant in the plane of the Galaxy, and is most likely a Disrupted Recycled Pulsar (DRP). If so, it is the fastest DRP yet discovered.

The Einstein@Home volunteers whose computers found the pulsar with the highest significance are Chris and Helen Colvin, from Ames Iowa and Daniel Gebhardt, Musikinformatik, Universitaet Mainz.

Additional information about the discovery is available on our web pages. I will also talk about it at the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit on September 2nd.

We thank ALL Einstein@Home volunteers for their support, and look forward eagerly to our next discovery.

Bruce Allen, Director, Einstein@Home
August 12, 2010
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The NSF webcast is now online.

BM

Congratulations to the volunteers and the AEI staff involved in this discovery! I think this is a great day also for BOINC in general and the concept of citizen science.

Cheers
HBE
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My heart skipped a beat or three !! This awesome .... :-) :-)

As Homer Simpson says : "it works on so many levels". It is indeed a multiple first and is a boon to the entire DC community. [ Having said that I am ever so cheesy grin that it was E@H - but that's my personal bias :-) ].

Looking at the detail, the discovery is at least mild on the weirdo scale - not in the middle of the pulsar garden - and I will eagerly await further definition of this beastie ....

[ I think I see harmonics ( of ~ 40Hz ) on the plot, more or less of equal strength and a suggestion of sidebands. I'm going to stare at the animations for a while ... ]

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Ah I can imagine, I reckon, the annular/crater like morphology of the emission cone, with our line-of-sight trekking across the outer edge, dipping in, running across the crater floor ( not hitting the exact centre but not far off it either ) and then slipping up and over the other side ( with a mild asymmetry between the outer rim slopes on entry and exit ). The pulse profile is the equivalent of a surveyors elevation map along a traverse line/cut - likely not an actual physical feature of the pulsar surface but in the sense of variation in emission strength with surface position. The edge of the glowing yellow cone in the animation is the peak of the 'crater rim'.
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." - Blaise Pascal

As a long-time fan of this project, I am excited to hear the excellent news! The sneak announcement of a possible second pulsar discovery (see time 22:00 to 22:35 in the NSF webcast) means the race is on. Congratulations to the lucky discoverers and let's keep crunching....

“This is the first time I’ve worked closely with radio astronomers making a discovery,” said Allen. “It was like watching 5-year-olds tearing Christmas presents. Or like watching someone throw chunks of meat at starving sharks.”

I'm disappointed at the rate with which new volunteers are joining Einstein@Home. My hope was that the publicity would get us 1000 new volunteers per hour, for a week. The current rate is about 150 per hour.

Could anyone suggest what might be done to improve this, in the next days? One suggestion was, if you read an on-line article about E@H, please add something to the 'COMMENT' area below the article, saying "to sign up, point your web browser to http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ and follow the instructions: Join Einstein@Home".
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I'm disappointed at the rate with which new volunteers are joining Einstein@Home. My hope was that the publicity would get us 1000 new volunteers per hour, for a week. The current rate is about 150 per hour.

Could anyone suggest what might be done to improve this, in the next days? One suggestion was, if you read an on-line article about E@H, please add something to the 'COMMENT' area below the article, saying "to sign up, point your web browser to http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ and follow the instructions: Join Einstein@Home".

This is soooooooooo awesome! Congrats to the volunteers and especially the scientific and technical teams,
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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System
More BOINC information than you can shake a stick of RAM at.

What about contributors directly contacting one's local media outlets with a suggestion ( eg. provide E@H website link ) to follow-up/research the story, evidently in the science category.

This is soooooooooo awesome! Congrats to the volunteers and especially the scientific and technical teams,

This is a good idea. Many local radio and TV stations and newspapers would probably be more interested in doing a story if they felt there was a local person who could talk about their participation in the project.

9682 new hosts in the last 24 hours.

The rate of volunteers signing up is increasing. We're now up to 4800 in the first 24 hours, so about 200/hour. And in the past ten hours the rate has been 250/hour. That's an improvement!
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Hi all, I have just recently joined after seeing the report in the UK BBC local news website.
I must admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by the space "jargon".
Many congrats and thanks to the people who have found the pulsar, if it wasn`t for you I wouldn`t of known that I could do this with my pc.
Dee

I believe project scientists need to take an active part in spreading the word: the "story" to get out there is your story, and crunchers could only assist in getting the word out in a limited fashion.

One couldn't/wouldn't have to speak on behalf of E@H, but simply give them a heads up on the discovery.

Congratulations for your discovery.This makes me want to return.And I am returning.

I have a Pentium 2.4 GHZ to this project.My dual cores are for WCG only.

By the way.Why isn't it possible to select ONLY the Arecibo binary pulsar search.

The other apps are greyed out...

Well I managed to hit one of the Melbourne dailies :-)



Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) It's in the weekly 'Learn' supplement/lift-out, evidently a pretty straight copy from here. That's all it took from me - a quick word or twenty with a web link - entered into their web form for 'news tips'.

( edit ) Oooh, heck! It's also turned up in another Melbourne daily I contacted - here. See how easy it is? Now, get to it team .... :-)

( edit ) AND the same story ran in Brisbane ( same media group ) - here. There! If I can do it, anyone can .... :-)

( edit ) AND in Sydney ( same media group ) - here. I'll have to take back a few of my earlier comments about the Aussie media now .... :-)

( edit ) Here's some other Aussie sites reporting on the discovery too ..... here, there and also here.

( edit ) Actually the timing on some releases appears to precede my contact with them, by my recollection. No matter ...... what matters is E@H is getting some good coverage DownUnda. Contributors ought still poke their local media outlets regardless ..... ;-)
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." - Blaise Pascal

Also in Germany there are some articles to be read, watch this :
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltall/0,1518,711702,00.html

Bruce and company (that means everyone, I guess)... CONGRATS!!! The news of this discovery is a triumph for all of us, even if the data was only "significant" on two computers.

I had quit BOINCing after I lost 2 hard drives and about 4 years worth of photographs, but this makes it feel (almost) like it was worth the loss.

Success breeds success. KEEP IT UP!!!

I am now opening a bottle of Lagavulin 16 to celebrate this grand occasion. Cheers to all!

Yep, for me, it was the news about the Pulsar find that brought me here :)
I saw it on the UK BBC News website and thought I would like to help out if I could.

I notice that our TFLOPS has moved up in recent weeks, just now 292.4, from the low 270's .....

Cheers, Mike.
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." - Blaise Pascal

I notice that our TFLOPS has moved up in recent weeks, just now 292.4, from the low 270's .....

Hi!

The talk Tullio mentioned seems to be the one available at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/attachment/wiki/WorkShop10/BOINCws2010_Knispel.pdf.

Yes, looks like a Neutron-Star - White Dwarf binary, and with an orbital period of < 10 hours (!), comparable to the period of the famous Hulse-Taylor pulsar PSR 1913+16 which is just under 8 hrs.

CU
HBE
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Well, we've cracked over 300 TFlops. I can't recall what our best ever is/was.

Cheers, Mike.
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." - Blaise Pascal

Hi Tullio,

I gather from the BOINC Workshop slides that "our" second pulsar should be a binary system, composed by a neutron star and a white dwarf. Is it so?

Hi Tullio,

yes, that is effectively what the Shapiro delay does. You can imagine it as the pulsar's radio waves (and pulses) having to travel down and up again in the companion's gravitational potential well. Thus, at the point the pulses are slightly delayed compared to the propagation without the companion in the line of sight.


Cheers,
Ben
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Hi all,

it wasn't only a possible pulsar find no. 2. We do have a second Einstein@Home pulsar, some details of which can be found at the end of my talk from the last BOINC workshop in London here.

In short: it's a pulsar in a binary with an orbital period of 9.41 hours in an almost perfectly circular orbit. The mass of the companion is not known yet, but must be at least 0.93 solar masses. Most likely it is a massive white dwarf, but it could also be a neutron star companion.

There have been almost daily observations of the system in September which allowed us to get a timing solution for the orbit. This method allows one to determine a model of the pulsar system in which the arrival time of each single radio pulse can be predicted to an average precision of a few ten microseconds in our case. Further observations should allow to determine the companion mass and orbital geometry of the system.

Cheers, Ben
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Hi Ben,

Will it be possible to use this system to test indirectly the theory of gravitational waves (as was done in the Nobel prize winning work of Hulse & Taylor)?

CU
HBE
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Wooo woooo !! Cracked 330 TFLOPS. :-)

Cheers, Mike.
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." - Blaise Pascal

As with the first discovery an official announcement will reveal the details of the 'second' pulsar when it has been published in a paper by PALFA collaboration. The problem with this pulsar is that is is much weaker (i.e. probably further away) than the first one, and it is indeed in binary system. Both means that much more observation time is required to confirm its existence and to determine the exact parameters than it was the case with the first discovery. The first discovery could be verified and timed within a few hours by almost any radio observatory on earth; AFAIK for the second pulsar observations are still being made and calculations done.

I am tempted to say that away from the galactic center, i.e. in the currently searched 'anti-center' data set pulsars are much thinner. I don't know of any pleasant surprises there yet, but post-processing still requires manual inspection and thus is usually a couple of days behind. And Benjamin will be away the next two weeks, which will delay this even further.

BM