Citizen scientists discover rotating pulsar

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: three citizen scientists -- an American couple and a German -- have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This 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 different countries. This is the first genuine astronomical discovery by a public volunteer distributed computing project.