Some are more common than others – in some cases, only a handful of specimens are known,” explains Ralph Eatough, scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn and second author of the publication.
“There are different kinds of pulsars, just like there are different animal species in a zoo. The researchers used the radio telescopes near Parkes, at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, and at Effelsberg for follow-up observations and to characterize their discoveries in more detail. The astronomers employed new methods that allowed them to discover pulsars previously masked by the presence of these interference signals. The recorded data often contain pulsar-like, man-made interference signals. The development of new post-processing methods proved to be just as crucial. Raw computing power was not the only important factor to discover the two dozen new pulsars. Additional processing information and computation details are shown in the corners of the screen.Ĭopyright: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/O. The orange crosshair shows the sky position currently being analysed. Magenta and red points are known pulsars and supernova remnants, respectively, which are concentrated along the plane of the Milky Way. The screensaver shows the rotating celestial sphere with the brightest stars and their constellations. The project comes with a screensaver that displays information about the processing on the volunteer's computer. The analysis of the archival Parkes data was completed in eight months, while the same task would have taken a single CPU core more than 17,000 years. This places on par with the world's fastest supercomputers. Pulsar searches with public participationĮach week, 50,000 volunteers from around the world “donate” idle compute cycles on their 200,000 home and office PCs to Together they combine to yield a sustained computing power of around 860 teraFLOPs per second. To determine the a priori unknown characteristics of the pulsar, e.g., its distance or its rotation period, we have to very finely comb through wide parameter ranges,” says Knispel. “The search for new radio pulsars is very computer intensive. Knispel and his colleagues analysed data from the Parkes Multi-beam Pulsar Survey, conducted from 1997 to 2001, with the 64-meter antenna of CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in southeast Australia. Large and sensitive radio telescopes are required to discover the weak signals from new pulsars. If the radio wave beam points towards Earth, the pulsar can be observed.
They rapidly rotate and emit a beam of radio waves along their magnetic field axis – similar to the spotlight of a lighthouse. They are strongly magnetized and extremely dense neutron stars.
Pulsars are the remnants from explosions of massive stars. “Through the participation of the public, we discovered 24 new pulsars in our Milky Way, which had previously been missed – and some of them are particularly interesting.” Complex searches for cosmic lighthouses “We could only conduct our search thanks to the enormous computing power provided by the volunteers,” says Benjamin Knispel, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Hannover, and lead author of the study now published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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