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 excited?

[pirot]

Of course it is not a zero-sum game. My point is that it is less news-worthy today, ***in terms of methodology***, as distributed computing is much more commonplace compared to 10 years ago. I am sure it would have been front-page news if this was done 10 years back.