Syracuse University Gravitational Wave Group

Join the Search for Gravitational Waves with Einstein at Home

Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer's idle CPU cycles to search LIGO data for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars). Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society and by a number of international organizations. The picture to the right shows the Crab Nebula. The nebula is remnant of a supernova that exploded in 1054. At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a rotating neutron star. Einstein@Home performs an "all-sky search" for gravitational waves from pulsars. This means that it searches for gravitational waves not just from the pulsars we know about, like the Crab, but also for gravitational waves coming from objects that we have not already observed. Since we don't know the location of these objects we have to search everywhere on the sky. This makes the search very computationally expensive, which is where you can help! You can join the search for gravitational waves by going to the Einstein@Home sign-up page and installing the software on your computer, or you can learn more about the project at the Einstein@Home Web Page.

A composite image of the Crab Nebula showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. The Crab Pulsar lies in the center of the nebula. (NASA/ESA)