On February 19, Linde Professor of Physics Barry Barish, director of the LIGO laboratory based at Caltech, announced the Einstein@Home computing project at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, D.C.

Astrophysics using your home PC

A new, grassroots computing project, dubbed Einstein@Home, will let anyone with a personal computer contribute to cutting-edge astrophysics research. Announced last month, the home-based project is designed to aid in the search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational-wave detectors, including LIGO—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—which has its headquarters on the Caltech campus. A joint project of Caltech and MIT, LIGO’s two detectors are located in remote locales near Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which are produced by such events in our galaxy and the universe as black hole collisions, shockwaves from the cores of exploding supernovae, rotating pulsars, neutron stars, and quark stars. These ripples travel toward Earth, bringing with them information about their origins and invaluable clues to the nature of gravity.

Finding such signals in gravitational-wave data is computationally intensive. Therefore LIGO researchers are working to enlist the aid of an army of home computer users to analyze the data through a distributed computing project, much like the popular SETI@Home project that searches radio antenna signals for signs of extraterrestrial life. Due to the extraordinary amount of data that gravitational detectors collect, the researchers hope to involve hundreds of thousands of people in the effort.

Einstein@Home is a program of the World Year of Physics 2005 celebration of the centennial of Albert Einstein’s miraculous year. That was the year 1905, when Einstein revolutionized much of science with three groundbreaking advances: he proved the existence of atoms and molecules, he validated the emerging field of quantum mechanics, and he developed the special theory of relativity—which led to the most famous equation ever written, E =mc².

Einstein@Home is a screensaver-based project that analyzes the data while a PC is otherwise idle. During the analysis it displays a screensaver that depicts the celestial sphere with the major constellations outlined, and includes a moving marker indicating the portion of the sky being searched for gravitational-wave signals. Versions of the program are available for PCs running on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. If you are interested in signing up your personal computer, please see http://
einstein.phys.uwm.edu.
•