Einstein@Home

Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly spinning and non-axisymmetrically deformed. The project was officially launched on 19 February 2005 as part of the American Physical Society's contribution to the World Year of Physics 2005 event. Einstein@Home searches data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors. The project conducts the most sensitive all-sky searches for continuous gravitational waves. While no such signal has yet been detected, the upper limits set by Einstein@Home analyses provide astrophysical constraints on the galactic population of spinning neutron stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Einstein@Home also searches radio telescope data from the Arecibo Observatory, and has in the past analyzed data from Parkes Observatory. On 12 August 2010, the first discovery by Einstein@Home of a previously undetected radio pulsar J2007+2722, found in data from the Arecibo Observatory, was published in Science. This was the first data-based discovery by a volunteer computing project. As of December 2023, Einstein@Home had discovered 55 radio pulsars. The project also analyses data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to discover gamma-ray pulsars. On 26 November 2013, the first Einstein@Home results of the Fermi data analysis was published: the discovery of four young gamma-ray pulsars in data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). As of December 2023, Einstein@Home has discovered 39 previously unknown gamma-ray pulsars in data from the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The Einstein@Home search makes use of novel and more efficient data-analysis methods and discovered pulsars missed in other analyses of the same data....