A couple of at-home space nuts recently discovered a pulsar with a screensaver that uses idle PC time to process data collected from telescopes.

By using Einstein@Home to ‘donate’ a PC’s processors to the pursuit of science, the program harnesses thousands of willing computers, rather than one supercomputer, to analyze data.

This helps on-the-clock astronomers to cheaply continue their research while they sift through data collected from the Arecibo radio telescope and the LIGO gravitational wave detector.