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Home PCs Help Pinpoint Pulsars
家庭電腦幫助確定脈沖星。
It’s pretty rare to find a scientific study that acknowledges key contributions from individuals who go by names like “IG_the_cheetah” and “Revoluzzer.” But Ig and Rev were big helps in finding previously unknown pulsars in our own Milky Way galaxy—24 of them. The discovery is in the Astrophysical Journal.
很少見到科學研究承認主要貢獻來自于IG_the_cheetah和Revoluzzer這些網友。但是這些網友在找到銀河中之前未知的24顆脈沖星發揮了很大作用。這個發現發表在《天體物理學》雜志上。
A pulsar is the rapidly rotating ultra-dense remnant of a collapsed massive star. Imagine the mass of the sun, compressed to the diameter of a medium-size city, spinning faster than a DVD.
脈沖星是一種快速轉動的超高密度殘骸，來自毀滅的大型恒星。想象下太陽壓縮成中型城市直徑大小的物質，比DVD轉得還快。
The new pulsars were found by the distributed computing project Einstein@Home . It uses idle computing time on the PCs of thousands of volunteer users—like Ig and Rev—to scan telescope data for pulsar signals. In this case the data were more than a decade old, but still contained a few hidden gems—such as the pulsars that have now been unearthed, if you will, for astronomers to study in greater detail.
新的脈沖星是由分布各地的“家中的愛因斯坦”計算機項目發現的。使用成千上萬個志愿者電腦的閑置計算時間，諸如Ig和Rev的電腦，掃描望遠鏡數據中的脈沖星信號。這個項目中的數據有十年之久了，但是還是很有未發現的部分，如果你能發現新的脈沖星，就能使天文學家研究其中細節。
You too can lend your spare computer power to the pulsar hunt. Einstein@Home even runs on Android devices. So your smartphone could help make us all smarter.
你也可以將你的空閑電腦力量用于尋找脈沖星。“家中的愛因斯坦”項目甚至能在安卓裝置上運行。所以說你的智能手機能讓我們更聰明。
—John Matson
