Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar

[PoppaGeek]

Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar

A new preprint reports the second Einstein@Home discovery, of a radio pulsar orbiting a white dwarf star once every 9.4 hours. The pulsar, called J1952+2630, is spinning on its axis 48 times per second. It was discovered in data collected at Arecibo Observatory in 2005 by the PALFA Collaboration. The white-dwarf companion star is unusually massive, and weighs at least 95% as much as our sun. This means that J1952+2630 probably belongs to a rare class of intermediate-mass binary pulsars (five were previously known).

Congratulations to the two Einstein@Home participants whose computers found J1952+2630 with the highest significance: Dr. Vitaliy V. Shiryaev (Moscow, Russia) and Stacey Eastham (Darwen, UK)! And a big "thank you" to all Einstein@Home volunteers, whose continuing support makes these exciting discoveries possible.

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home

[Serpentarius]

Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar

wow.... imagine how fast the thing travels .... the amount of gravity of that dwarf star must be immense to able to drag this pulsar to orbit around it at that speed

[werdwerdus]

Dear Werdwerdus,

In the last days we have confirmed that Einstein@Home has discovered a new radio pulsar in data from the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey. I'm happy to tell you that your computer was one of the two which discovered this new pulsar with highest significance. Some details about the new pulsar are available here: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/radiopu...S_discoveries/

IMPORTANT: if you think this email is not for real, please look at that public web page and you will see your Einstein@Home account name on the right-hand side of the list!

I plan to put a news item on the Einstein@Home front page about this very soon. If you agree, I would like to acknowledge you by your real name, so would be very grateful if you could write back to me. We are still investigating this sytem, but will eventually publish the discovery in a scientific publication. I'd also like to ask permission to acknowledge you by name in the scientific publication. Once the publication is out, I will also send you a nice certificate of appreciation.

Please let me know how you would like to have your name appear on the certificate, and send me your mailing address. Similarly, if we can acknowledge you by name in our web-page news item and in the publication, please tell me how you would like your name to appear there.

Since we started Einstein@Home more than seven years ago, we have sent out more than 100 million workunits. The odds of receiving a "discovery workunit", as you have, are similar to those of winning a big national lottery. So congratulations, and thanks for supporting Einstein@Home!

Sincerely,
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home

lmao, I only ran this project briefly several months ago! Only have 21,500 points to boot

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/radiopu...S_discoveries/

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/show_us...?userid=558381

[Ket]

Eh.. wheres all the little green men at? I have 880,945 credit for SETI and still not a peep out of them Even being conservative we know its a mathematical impossibility that there isn't other intelligent life in the Milky Way, based on there being 200 million stars in the galaxy (lowest end of the estimate, could be all the way up to 400-500 million) if even only 0.5% of those 200 million stars had planets with intelligent life that still means galaxy wide there is up to 10,000 intelligent civilizations out there.

If you want we can then factor in natural disasters that wipe out intelligent life on said planets, lets say half, so we are left with 5000, then lets factor in global self destruction through weapons of mass destruction etc, lets call that half the planets again to bring the figure down to 2500, then if you want to be really anal and insist that a jupiter type planet is needed to help keep that planet harboring life safe again cut that 2500 in half we are left with 1250. Now lets factor in planets capable of supporting intelligent life but intelligent life simply never developed we are down to 625, lets factor in aliens who simply don't want to answer us because they think we are too stupid / primitive, we'll say half of that 625 again, we are left with the grand sum of 312 say. Finally lets factor in intelligent civilizations that aren't yet advanced enough to send us a message back or something, we are down to 155. So.. being as conservative as I think is possible theres potentially 155 other intelligent civilisations out there who want to talk to us.

All in all... yeah.. bloody green men stop being so rude and answer that ringing satellite or whatever you use