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<b>Home Computers Search for Gravity Waves</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />Scientists searching for waves of gravitational energy that stretch space and time will soon be seeking the public's help in analysing their data. <br /><br />Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) hope to enlist up to a million personal computers in their search for sources of the waves, which have long been predicted but never seen. <br /><br />Their distributed-computing scheme, set to launch this month, aims to be one of the largest projects of its kind ever created. The software is already in beta testing.<br /><br />Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity lays out the idea that gravity distorts space and time. As a test of his theory, Einstein predicted that waves of gravity would ripple through the cosmos. Some claim such waves have been spotted indirectly, from observations of how paired stars influence each other's orbits, but nobody has seen them firsthand.<br /><br />Since 2000, researchers at LIGO have scanned the sky for tiny shifts of space that would prove Einstein's theory. The project is being built by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on two sites, one in Livingston, Louisiana and the other in Hanford, Washington. It uses a system of lasers and mirrors that can detect a shift in space as small as the width of an atom.<br /><br />Bell ringers<br /><br />LIGO's best hope for detecting gravity waves is to spot a cosmic source that sends out regular ripples of gravitational energy. A source such as a spinning star made of neutrons would set the detectors ringing like a bell. <br /><br />The problem is that the detectors pick up an enormous number of unwanted vibrations. "It's a needle in a haystack problem: 99.99% of the data is noise," says Bruce Allen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. <br /><</safety_wrapper>