On this day fourteen years ago, on 6 April 2011, the second radio pulsar discovered with @einsteinathome was published.
Our distributed computing project had started almost exactly two years earlier to analyze data from the Arecibo radio telescope with the help of tens of thousands of volunteers.
This second discovery was special: the pulsar orbits the common center of mass with a white dwarf in just 9.4 hours and it belongs to a rare “species”.
https://www.aei.mpg.de/191149/einstein-home-detects-unusual-stellar-pair
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/732/1/L1
At the time, it was assumed that this pulsar could be used to observe relativistic effects. This was finally achieved in 2022 after many more observations: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/12/aa44699-22/aa44699-22.html