News

Einstein@Home public event 2011

March 31, 2011

The Albert-Einstein-Institut in Hannover is planning to host a public event on July 1st, in celebration of the anniversary of the first Einstein@Home radio-pulsar discovery.

We plan to have guests from all around the world, some enlightening talks and a nice barbecue. There will be the possibility to see the computing facilities of the AEI and probably to visit the GEO600 GW detector site.

Space-Time Quest

March 10, 2011

Our LIGO/GEO Colleagues at the University of Birmingham have just released a free and fun interactive computer game called "Space-Time Quest". It is available from this web site. There is also a one-minute YouTube trailer describing the game, which involves designing, building and operating a modern gravitational-wave detector on a fixed 100-million-pound budget.

Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar

March 01, 2011

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).