Einstein@home finds rare pulsar, gets published

[twilyth]

This is really cool. E@home was originally dedicated to finding gravity waves but a couple of years ago they added the search for a special type of pulsar. The people whose computers found the data leading to the pulsar are given credit in the Science article. The journals Science and their UK competitor Nature are 2 of the most influential and widely read journals in the world.

Volunteers' Idle Computer Time Turns Up a Celestial Oddball

A newfound stellar remnant some 17,000 light-years away is not your everyday pulsar. For starters, the hyperdense, swiftly pirouetting object appears to belong to a rare class known as disrupted recycled pulsars. Pulsars are so known because they rotate rapidly—this one spins more than 40 times a second—and give off a beam of radio waves that sweeps across the sky, much like a lighthouse. To an outside observer the radiation appears to pulse each time the beam points in the observer's direction.

A disrupted recycled pulsar is a former member of a binary stellar pairing that first exploded as a supernova and collapsed to an extraordinarily dense object known as a neutron star, before cannibalizing matter from its neighbor, spinning faster all the while, and finally breaking free from its binary companion when the neighbor exploded as a supernova itself. Disrupted recycled pulsars are uncommon—a recent study estimated that of more than 1,500 known pulsars, only eight are of the disrupted recycled variety.