Even More Citizen Science

Continuing on the same thread as my last post, I'd like to point out another way for anyone to contribute to science.  I have been personally involved with BOINC distributed computing for a number of years.  Unlike with Galaxy Zoo, you aren't doing the science with BOINC, your computer is.  While it originated at the same lab at the University of California - Berkeley where the well-known SETI@home is based, you can do much more than search for extraterrestrial life using BOINC.

The Einstein@Home Screensaver (detailed description)

One astronomy-related project is Einstein@Home, which searches for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars, called pulsars.  The name comes from the fact that Albert Einstein first predicted their existence based on his theory of general relativity.  Einstein@home uses data from 3 gravitational-wave detectors to conduct its search, namely the LIGO Hanford and Livingston interferometers in the United States and GEO600 in Germany.  The image to the right shows a portion of the search in progress.  It includes a celestial sphere with major constellations for reference.  The small purple dots are known pulsars and the red ones are supernova remnants.  The orange marker shows the area of the sky that is currently being searched.

Like all other attempts to find gravitational waves, Einstein@home has not made a direct detection yet.  However, the project has also begun incorporating data from the Arecibo radio telescope and Fermi gamma-ray satellite, which has lead to the discovery of over 3 dozen new pulsars.   The latest publication of pulsar detections was last November, in this paper, announcing the discovery of 4 gamma-ray pulsars.  The accompanying press release includes images like the map of the pulsars shown here and even a photo of one of the discoverers (a person running Einstein@Home on his home computer).

Another BOINC astronomy project is called MilkyWay@Home.  This, not surprisingly, runs models to tell us about the structure of the MilkyWay galaxy.  One approach MilkyWay@Home uses is to utilize evolutionary and genetic algortihms to simulate galaxy formation and mergers.  Another approach is to use N-body simulations (as shown in the animation on the left), to model collisions between dwarf galaxies and the MilkyWay.  As described on the project science page, the data is helping to build an accurate 3D model of the MilkyWay.

As you might imagine, BOINC projects exist in many fields other than astronomy.  Rather than attempting to summarize more, I'll just link to the official list.

One thing about some BOINC projects that surprises me as someone who has studied computer science is how efficient their code is.  Distributed computing offers a massive amount of computing power, but with major caveats.  I like to think of it as a massive distributed memory system with each person's computer as a node.  But unlike a normal cluster, there is no inter-node communication and a node may never return a result - or worse, return one that is completely wrong.  So, kudos to the collaboration of scientists and volunteers that has made this combination work and produced good science in the process.