Einstein@Home - Search For Gravitational Waves

You may have already tried out SETI@home. Now Einstein@Home will let anyone with a PC contribute to cutting edge astrophysics research!



Einstein@Home is a flagship program of the World Year of Physics 2005 celebration of the centennial of Albert Einstein's miraculous year. The program searches for gravitational waves in data collected by US and European gravitational wave detectors.

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly.

Gravitational waves?? They are ripples in the fabric of space and time produced by violent events in the universe such as black hole collisions and exploding stars (supernovae).

Longer-lived sources of gravitational waves include rapidly rotating compact stars, and binary systems composed of two orbiting stars. The ripples travel through space, carrying information both about their source and about the nature of gravity itself.

Finding such signals in gravitational wave data requires an enormous amount of computing power. Estimates indicate that searching gravitational data with the maximum possible sensitivity would require many times the computing capacity of even the most powerful supercomputer.

Therefore, LIGO Scientific Collaboration researchers from the Albert Einstein Institute, UWM, and the LIGO Laboratory are enlisting the aid of an army of home computer users to analyze the data.

Much like the popular SETI@Home project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, Einstein@Home will involve hundreds of thousands people who will dedicate a portion of their personal computers' computational time to the project.

The Einstein@Home program is available for PCs running Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. When the computer is not in use, it downloads LIGO and GEO600 data from a central server and searches it for gravitational wave signals. While running, it displays a screensaver that depicts the celestial sphere, with the major constellations outlined. A moving marker indicates the portion of the sky currently being searched on the computer.

Happy hunting!

Einstein@home website:
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/