First Pulsar Discovery By an @Home Project

pq writes "In a paper published today (abstract) in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany." The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing is hard to swallow; there are quite a few distributed projects out there, several of which have reported positive results, such as the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne number.

Comments

Re:A little bit too late to be exited?

[Chris Burke]

Is it really sad that distributed computing is so commonplace that it's resulting in discoveries in fields as disperse as biochemistry, abstract mathematics, and astronomy? That sounds like... the opposite of sad. Something went from being new and exciting but small scale to massive and available to many, and now many more projects are able to exploit it. That sounds exciting to me.

Sure Foldit is more interesting and exciting from the technological development standpoint. Is this some kind of zero-sum game where that necessarily means it eats up the excitement points of discovering pulsars with "traditional" distributed computing projcets?