Amatuers discover new pulsar

As my regular readers (both of you) know, I love stories about achievements of amateurs or "citizen scientists." In the age of big government and big corporate projects, amateurs are seemingly forgotten. But amateurs are still out there. They discover new species, map the ranges and changing habits of birds, discover asteroids, etc. Now two such devotees of science, using a professionally developed software in a volunteer mass computing project, called Einstein@Home, have pinpointed a new pulsar. It's a big deal. As astronomy professor James Cordes put it, "No matter what else we find out about it, this pulsar is bound to be extremely interesting for understanding the basic physics of neutron stars and how they form."

THANKS TO Dana Stabenow for posting this on FaceBook