![]() First of all, such waves will generically be very weak. These waves have a very simple structure – they are emitted as regular continuous sine waves with a frequency twice as large as that of the star’s rotation.Įven though the signal itself is simple, its identification in the detector data is not. Where are all of them? Some of the missing neutron stars may only be detectable by measuring the gravitational waves they emit. Back-of-the-envelope calculations using the rate of supernova explosions that create neutron stars imply that there should be about 100 million neutron stars in the Milky Way. Neutron stars are well-known “beasts” to astronomers: about 3000 of them are known as pulsars in our Galaxy. In order to emit gravitational waves, they must own a slight asymmetry with respect to their rotational axis (for example, stars that have tiny bumps on their surface). The characteristic pattern that is looking for is a very simple class of gravitational wave signals, which are emitted by rapidly rotating, slightly deformed neutron stars. This matched filter search – looking for characteristic patterns buried deep within large amounts of noisy data – requires huge computing power. To find out whether a gravitational wave is buried in the noise, one can search for gravitational wave signals with a well-known shape, or waveform. This is because in current gravitational wave detectors, the gravitational wave signals from rapidly rotating neutron stars are expected to be very weak compared with the detector noise. The project that invites users to join the gravitational wave hunt is called and the reason for this effort is that the hunt requires immense computing power. A screen saver (see below) allows the volunteers to stay up to date with what data their computers are analyzing and where in the sky the program is currently searching for gravitational waves. Whenever they are not using the full computing power, their PCs analyze data from the LIGO detectors to search for continuous gravitational waves. ![]() Tens of thousands of computer users world-wide hunt for gravitational waves – by donating idle compute cycles on their personal computers. Searching for electromagnetic features of neutron stars.The most sensitive search for continuous gravitational waves. ![]() As powerful as the largest supercomputers.Harnessing the power of private computers.
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