What is known as a “disrupted binary pulsar” was discovered by home computers running the Einstein@Home project, where these pulsars are birthed whenever a massive star collapses. The shared discovery fell upon the lot of folks from the US and Germany, as normal home users donate time on their computers to use them for sifting through scientific data – similar to what the SETI distributed computing effort that has more than 3 million users currently. Chris and Helen Colvin, information technology professionals from Iowa, US, and systems analyst Daniel Gebhardt from Mainz in Germany, were credited with the discovery – too bad for the remaining 499,997 others who chipped in. The newly discovered radio pulsar has been dubbed as the PSR J2007+2722. If you tend to leave your computer on most of the time even when you’re not using it, why not sign up for a distributed computing effort?
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