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.