By putting their home computers to work when they would otherwise be idle, three people on two continents have discovered a lone pulsar approximately 17,000 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula.

The finding, from data collected by the Cornell-managed Arecibo Observatory's ongoing Pulsar ALFA (PALFA) survey and archived and processed by the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 countries.

Credited with the discovery are Chris and Helen Colvin, both information technology professionals of Ames, Iowa, and systems analyst Daniel Gebhardt of Universität Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany. Their computers, along with 500,000 others from around the world, analyze data for Einstein@Home. (On average, donors contribute about two computers each.)

Einstein@Home was originally organized to find gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time -- using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). In 2009, data from the Arecibo Observatory were included in the processing.

The newly discovered pulsar, PSR J2007+2722, is an isolated neutron star that rotates 41 times per second and has an unusually low magnetic field.