24 New Pulsars Were Discovered with the Help of Regular Old PCs

The humble home or office computer—so commonplace that they’re being phased out for the novelty and convenience of tablets—is capable of amazing things. And not just in a “if you brought one back to World War II, you’d be king” sort of way. You see, a network of home and office PCs just surveyed the Milky Way and found 24 pulsars

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> to sift through data collected from 1997 to 2001 by CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in southeast Australia.

Nice work. I’d really like to know if any of these line up with any of the mysterious unknown objects found by the Fermi space telescope.

As a person who’s done computer analysis of Kepler data, I find the numerical methods used interesting and slightly baffling.

Just wondering how many pulsars are known now.

oarval says “over 300 pulsars have been located”. That’s still a remarkably small number.

The Fermi-LAT catalog contains 117 pulsars visible in gamma rays.

On the other hand putting “maintype=Psr” into the Simbad database yields 2286 hits. Looking at them, this seems reliable, about 2286 pulsars are known.