Ten year anniversary of the J2007+2722 discovery
10 Sep 2020 1:27:36 UTC
Topic 223459
(moderation:
I want to give a shout out to Einstein @ Home on the 10th anniversary of the first pulsar being published! When we were invited to attend the event in Hanover the next year, we made sure we got copies signed. When my CPU and GPU were retired, we had all three framed together. My new rig dedicated to BOINC is an AMD 3600 with two older GPUs. Those will be upgraded when I updated my primary workstations.
For any readers who weren't
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For any readers who weren't around 10 years ago, the above comment is in relation to the Arecibo Binary Radio Pulsar search that was in progress at that time. You will find the full results for that search published here.
There were 3 detections of two previously unknown pulsars and a whopping 270 re-detections of 134 previously known pulsars. It was a very productive time for Einstein@Home and the volunteers involved.
Both of the newly discovered pulsars were what are known as "millisecond pulsars". They spin so rapidly that they complete a full rotation in milliseconds. It's quite mind-boggling to think of an object with the mass of a star and a diameter of maybe 10-15km rotating at a rate of 40-50 times per second as those two discoveries were. If you happen to be browsing the full list, any millisecond pulsars will be easily spotted by the "MSP!" label underneath their spin frequency (2nd column in the data tables).
Cheers,
Gary.
Thanks for sharing this! This
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Thanks for sharing this! This brings back so many nice memories.
Here is a link to the image so you can see (or actually read) it more easily in full resolution.
Full res image
HB
Very, very cool!
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Very, very cool!
Ideas are not fixed, nor should they be; we live in model-dependent reality.