Idle home computers are being sought to help search through mountains of astronomical data. The Skynet project involves using the spare processing capacity of computers as a giant, distributed supercomputer. PC's joining Skynet will scour the data for sources of radiation that reveal stars, galaxies and other cosmic structures. People who process the most data could win a visit to one of the observatories gathering data for the project. Read more
Want to help astronomers make awesome discoveries and understand our Universe?
By connecting 100s and 1000s of computers together through the Internet, it's possible to simulate a single machine capable of doing some pretty amazing stuff. theSkyNet is a community computing project dedicated to radio astronomy. Radio astronomers use radio telescopes (of course) to observe the Universe at radio wavelengths (still with me?). All day, every day, signals from distant galaxies, stars and other cosmic bits and pieces arrive at the Earth in the form of radio waves. Once detected by a radio telescope the signal is processed by computers and used by scientists to support a theory or inspire a new one. Read more