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.
Key facts
- Distributed computing project.name
- Einstein@Home
- Distributed computing project.developer
- Max Planck Society (MPG)
- Distributed computing project.operating system
- Cross-platform
- Distributed computing project.platform
- BOINC
- Distributed computing project.license
- GPL-2.0-or-later
- Distributed computing project.status
- Active
- Distributed computing project.performance
- 7659.0 TFLOPS (December 2023)
- Distributed computing project.active users
- 16,069
- Distributed computing project.total users
- 1,048,317
- Distributed computing project.active hosts
- 34,751
- Distributed computing project.total hosts
- 8,140,803
- Distributed computing project.screenshot
~26 min read
Article
8 sectionsContents
- Scientific objectives
- Gravitational-wave data analysis and results
- Radio data analysis and results
- Gamma-ray data analysis and results
- See also
- References
- Scientific Publications
- External links
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.