Einstein@Home Volunteers Discover Four "Young" Gamma-Ray Pulsars

Congratulations to our volunteers:

Thomas M. Jackson, Kentucky, USA
Mak-ino, Japan
Doug Lean, Australia
Hans-Peter Tobler, Germany
NEMO computing cluster, UW-Milwaukee, USA
Chen, USA
David Z, Canada
Test, France

whose computers have found 4 new gamma-ray pulsars in data from the Large Area Telescope on board NASA's Fermi Satellite. These are the first gamma-ray pulsars ever discovered by Einstein@Home; only a few dozen such objects (spinning neutron stars whose pulsations are only visible via their gamma rays) are known.

The scientific paper is available here (use PDF link on the top right-hand side) and will be published in the next hours in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. If you are interested in learning more, a press release and other materials concerning the discovery are also available on-line.

Many thanks to all Einstein@Home volunteers, whose computers have made these exciting discoveries possible!

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home

Comments

Mike Hewson
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Einstein@Home Volunteers Discover Four "Young" Gamma-Ray Pulsars

Wow ... we've bagged our first gammas, one the slowest known, two with/near remnants, all radio quiet, young, close ... check out the detection plots with glitches ... this is so tres cool !! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mumak
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Great news, congrats !

Great news, congrats !

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fadedrose
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This was so nice to read.

This was so nice to read. Congratulations to the finders,

Some credit goes to the program and to all of us. It took a lot of looking thru non-winners to find the gems. I also read the links you posted.

I look at my Task page and see that Gamma-Ray Pulsars #2 are on my work list. Am doing one now. Any chance that I'll get one from the Fermi satellite?

How does one know what work Gamma-Ray Pulsar Search #2 doing, I mean, which telescope?

Thank you.

Bernd Machenschalk
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RE: How does one know what

Quote:
How does one know what work Gamma-Ray Pulsar Search #2 doing, I mean, which telescope?

The "Gamma-Ray Pulsar Search #2" is just an extension of the previous "Gamma-Ray Pulsar Search" with more data from the Large Area Telescope on board of the Fermi satellite, and with a slightly improved application code. See this thread.

BM

BM

Arseny Mikhailovich
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nice

nice

microchip
microchip
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awesome! that's why I keep

awesome! that's why I keep crunching

tbret
tbret
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Excellent

Excellent news!

Congratulations to the folks who just kept plugging away until they caught one!

Good work, great stuff, and interesting and neat-o, too.

Benjamin Knispel
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Hi all, for our Italian

Hi all,

for our Italian readers, I'd like to point out that there is an Italian news release available online:

I raggi gamma e la citizen science

written by Patrizia Caraveo, Director of Research, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, and member of the Fermi Science Team.

Cheers,
Benjamin

 

Einstein@Home Project

Mike Hewson
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Just checking : each dot on

Just checking : each dot on Figs 2 & 3 represents a single photon detection event ?

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Benjamin Knispel
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RE: Just checking : each

Quote:
Just checking : each dot on Figs 2 & 3 represents a single photon detection event ?

In the bottom panel of Fig. 3 that is correct. There, each point is a single gamma-ray photon, the gray scale showing the probability of that photon to have been emitted by the pulsar. For each photon, the horizontal axis shows the rotational phase of the pulsar, i.e., in which direction the pulsar was pointing when the photon was emitted.

In Fig. 2, each dot shows the statistical likelihood of a pulsed signal assuming certain values of spin frequency (f) and spin frequency derivative (f_dot). The darker the point, the higher the likelihood that there is an actual signal at that combination of f and f_dot. The jumps in the vertical lines (in the left panels) indicate a sudden change in f – the telltale sign of a glitch.

Cheers,
Benjamin

 

Einstein@Home Project

Sid
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Great news! Probably it is a

Great news!
Probably it is a good reason to fix the issues with GPU application for Gamma-Ray Pulsar and bring it to us? Half of my tasks have failed, unfortunately.

Maximilian Mieth
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An article in German can be

An article in German can be found here.

Overtonesinger
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Exactly. You are right. GPU

Exactly. You are right. GPU app is great and deserves fixing.

More fixes needed here, please!

My OS: Windows 7 Professional SP1 (latest updates) x64 (ENGLISH version).
CPU: Intel Core i7 720 QM 1.6, TB 1-core up to 2.8 GHz (45 nm, no iGPU).
RAM: 4 x so-dimm 2GB Kingston DDR3 1333 CL7 (in dual channel)
GPU: ATi Mobility HD5870 : 800 stream processors @ 700 MHz, 1024 MB GDDR5@1000 MHz (4000 effectively). Those are stock clokcs.

The BUG:
When I set (in Computing preferences of BOINC) to use 100 percent of CPUs (instead of 90), tasks of "einsteinbinary_BRP5_1.39_windows_x86_64__BRP5-opencl-ati" will run for 24 hours and still in under 50 percent !!!

If Computing on 7 from 8 logical CPUs, this task is finished in 3 to 5 hours!

I have checked the proces-priorities, they are all GOOD! All CPU tasks (Asteroids sse2) have the "Low" priority and Einstein-GPU task has "Below normal". So, caching the data into GPU (and outputting results back) every ten minutes should DEFINITELY take precedence... but it does NOT! Why? Is there any child-process with accidentally set *bad* priority to Low??? Please, investigate.

As of NOW: I need to leave 1 logical CPU idle... just to be available to Einstein@Home every ten minutes ... for only approx. 36 seconds!

Thanx. :)

BRISINGR-II: PRIME X370-PRO,AMD'Zen 1800X 3.7/4.1, 2x8 DDR4 G.Sk.3602@2400,Asus STRIX GTX1070 DirectCUIII 8GB,*2017-04-08

BRISINGR: nb ASUS G73-JH,i7 1.73,4x2 DDR3-1333 CL7,ATi5870M 1GB,*2011-02-24

Gary Roberts
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RE: Exactly. You are right.

Quote:
Exactly. You are right. GPU app is great and deserves fixing.


The post you are responding to was discussing the FGRP3 GPU app. When that message was posted (November last year) there were problems that have since been resolved. However, the FGRP3 GPU app is still under active development.

Quote:
More fixes needed here, please!


You are using an entirely different app - the BRP5 GPU app. It is quite mature and is unlikely to need 'fixes'.

Quote:

The BUG:
When I set (in Computing preferences of BOINC) to use 100 percent of CPUs (instead of 90), tasks of "einsteinbinary_BRP5_1.39_windows_x86_64__BRP5-opencl-ati" will run for 24 hours and still in under 50 percent !!!

If Computing on 7 from 8 logical CPUs, this task is finished in 3 to 5 hours!


This is not a bug - it's simply the way things are - particularly when using HT. You really do need to leave a logical core free. In fact the overall performance may even be further improved by leaving two logical cores free. It's worth experimenting to determine the optimum operating conditions.

Cheers,
Gary.

ExtraTerrestrial Apes
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Adding to what Gary said: the

Adding to what Gary said: the app doesn't need the CPU only every 10 minutes for 36s (where do these numbers come from?). It's much more often, although only for small periods at a time.

MrS

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Chooka
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Doug Lean is my uncle in

Doug Lean is my uncle in law!
I've been crunching hard to try and add my name to this historic list :)