Chris Colvin

PC Screen Saver Leads to Discovery of New Star

WASHINGTON -- Astronomers announced Thursday the discovery of a new star, found with help from a most unusual source -- a screen saver.

Chris and Helen Colvin, owners of the personal computer running the screen saver are participants in a project called Einstein@home , an experiment in distributed computing that uses the donated idle time from hundreds of thousands of home computers across the globe in lieu of more expensive supercomputers. The June 11 discovery of the pulsar -- a dense, rotating star that appears to pulse like a lighthouse beacon -- was confirmed on June 14 by another user's computer in Germany. It marks the first time an astronomical body has been discovered this way."We've both been users since the beginning, but it was his desktop that got the golden packet," said Helen Colvin, who has a doctorate in human-computer interaction and attributes much of the find to luck. "It's just something that runs in the background and we don't think about it very much." Both Helen ...

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