MilkyWay@home

MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project in the astrophysics category, running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Using spare computing power from over 38,000 computers run by over 27,000 active volunteers , the MilkyWay@home project aims to generate accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way. With SETI@home and Einstein@home, it is the third computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose. Its secondary objective is to develop and optimize algorithms for volunteer computing. MilkyWay@home is a collaboration between the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's departments of Computer Science and Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy and is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It is operated by a team that includes astrophysicist Heidi Jo Newberg and computer scientists Malik Magdon-Ismail, Bolesław Szymański and Carlos A. Varela. By mid-2009 the project's main astrophysical interest is in the Sagittarius Stream, an immense stellar stream emanating from the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy that wraps around the Milky Way. Mapping such interstellar streams and their dynamics with high accuracy may provide crucial clues for understanding the structure, formation, evolution, and gravitational potential distribution of the Milky Way and similar galaxies. It could also provide insight on the dark matter issue. As the project evolves, it might turn its attention to other star streams. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, MilkyWay@home divides starfields into wedges of about 2.5 deg. width and applies self-optimizing probabilistic separation techniques (i.e., evolutionary algorithms) to extract the optimized tidal streams. The program then attempts to create a new, uniformly dense wedge of stars from the input wedge by removing streams of data.