Citizen scientists Chris and Helen Colvin from Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt from Mainz, Germany participate in Einstein@Home, a distributed computing program that involves a quarter of a million volunteers worldwide.
They donated their idle computer time to analyze data gathered by the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Without even realizing it they discovered a fast rotating pulsar.
The citizen scientists remotely join National Science Foundation’s Lisa-Joy Zgorski along with Einstein@Home director Bruce Allen and Cornell astronomer and Arecibo researcher Jim Cordes for a lengthy (38:47) discussion. Their findings are published in the online journal Science Express.
