user posted image rOn Monday 14 March, the 126th anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth, over 50,000 people around the world are helping in the hunt for the gravitational waves predicted by the great physicist nearly a century ago. These people have already downloaded the distributed-computing program Einstein@Home, which was only launched on 19 February 2005, and more than 1000 people per day are still joining.Dense moving objects such as spinning neutron stars or colliding black holes are predicted to send out ripples in space-time - gravitational waves - according to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. But so far no gravitational waves have ever been observed.Part of the problem lies with the computing power necessary to crunch data from the large and relatively new gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home <http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/>, run by universities in the US and Germany, is enlisting anyone with an internet connection to help analyse data from two gravitational wave searches.

Like the program SETI@Home, which searches radio telescope data for signals from extraterrestrial life, Einstein@Home runs while the computer is idle, showing a screensaver with the portion of sky from which the data is taken. Users' computers may spend weeks analysing 12-megabyte chunks of data from the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and the British-German GEO-600 gravitational wave observatory. Then their computers will upload the results of their analyses back to the Einstein@Home site.

user posted image View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist