Einstein@Home

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.

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.

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.

Such an approach was pioneered by the SETI@home project, which is designed to look for signs of extraterrestrial life by analyzing radio wave data.

[10][11] Users regularly contribute about 7.7 petaFLOPS of computational power,[10] which would rank Einstein@Home among the top 105 on the TOP500 list of supercomputers.

[13] The best understood potential CW sources are rapidly spinning neutron stars (including pulsars) which are expected to emit gravitational waves due to a deviation from Rotational symmetry.

Besides validating Einstein's theory of General Relativity, direct detection of gravitational waves would also constitute an important new astronomical tool.

[14] Since March 2009, part of the Einstein@Home computing power has also been used to analyze data taken by the PALFA Consortium at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

[20] The Einstein@Home analysis of the LAT data makes use of methods initially developed for the detection of continuous gravitational waves.

[22] Work on the S4 data set (LIGO's fourth science run) was started via interlacing with the S3 calculations and finished in July 2006.

The results of this search have led to the first scientific publication of Einstein@Home in Physical Review D.[23] Einstein@Home gained considerable attention in the international volunteer computing community when an optimized application for the S4 data set analysis was developed and released in March 2006 by project volunteer Akos Fekete, a Hungarian programmer.

The app created a large surge in the project's total performance and productivity, as measured by floating point speed (or FLOPS), which over time has increased by approximately 50% compared to non-optimized S4 applications.

[27] The first Einstein@Home analysis of the early LIGO S5 data set, where the instruments initially reached their design sensitivity, began on 15 June 2006.

Einstein@Home conducted a directed search for continuous gravitational waves from the central object in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

[36][37] Both these new methods were employed in the first Einstein@Home all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in Advanced LIGO data from the first observing run (O1), the results of which were published on 8 December 2017.

An Einstein@Home study on how to optimally use the limited computing power for directed searches (where prior information on the target object such as the sky position is available) was published on 31 January 2018.

[39] It describes the design of searches for continuous gravitational waves over a wide frequency range from three supernova remnants (Vela Jr, Cassiopeia A, and G347.3).

The results from the directed Einstein@Home search for continuous gravitational waves from the central objects of the supernova remnants Vela Jr., Cassiopeia A, and G347.3 was published on 29 July 2019.

No signal was found and the most stringent upper limit at the time of publication were set, improving earlier results by a factor of two for all three targets.

A follow-up of the Einstein@Home search for continuous gravitational waves from the central objects of the supernova remnants Vela Jr., Cassiopeia A, and G347.3 was published on 29 June 2020.

Results from a dedicated Einstein@Home search for continuous gravitational waves from the central object of the supernova remnant G347.3 was published on 5 August 2021.

The results exclude the existence of isolated neutron stars spinning at rotational frequencies of more than 200 Hertz with ellipticities larger than 5×10−8 closer than 100 parsec.

On 24 March 2009, it was announced that the Einstein@Home project was beginning to analyze data received by the PALFA Consortium at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

[15] On 26 November 2009, a CUDA-optimized application for the Arecibo Binary Pulsar Search was first detailed on official Einstein@Home webpages.

[4] The computers of Einstein@Home volunteers Chris and Helen Colvin and Daniel Gebhardt observed PSR 2007+2722 with the highest statistical significance.

[57][58] The discovery confirmed the pulsar nature of the object which had been suspected since 2012 based on the energy distribution of the gamma-ray photons observed by the LAT.

The project also announced that it was searching for gamma-ray pulsars in binary systems, which are more difficult to find due to the additional orbital parameters.

The discovery was made using a GPU-accelerated version of a modified gamma-ray pulsar search code, which included binary orbital parameters.

A thus targeted search for gamma-ray pulsations with Einstein@Home found a low-mass pulsar spinning at 377 Hertz in a 5.5 hour orbit with a companion of about a fifth of a solar mass.

[70] The catalog also includes 13 candidate spider pulsar systems, that could be targets for future searches for their gamma-ray pulsations with Einstein@Home.

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