Star search.

Don't have a hot dog recipe to contribute to Skooby's? Well, how about helping Caltech with some astrophysics research?

Dubbed Einstein@Home, the project is enlisting anyone with an interest in the galaxy and a computer to search for gravitational waves in the universe by sorting through data collected by U.S and European detectors.

Antennae at various observatories pick up signals from the far comers of the Milky Way Galaxy, up to distances of thousands of light years, producing reams of measurements. Caltech is the headquarters for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which in conjunction with MIT collects data from two observatories in the U.S.--one in Washington state and one in Louisiana.

Now here's the @Home part: a downloadable screensaver program analyzes data while a PC is idle; and Einstein@Home reported 16,000 downloads during the first week of its launch in February, according to Dr. Albert Lazzarini, astrophysicist and group leader for Caltech's LIGO lab. At any one time, about a third of the participating computers are running the software, each analyzing a little corner of the universe.

The screensaver displays a map of various constellations, with a moving marker pointing to the portion of the sky being analyzed by that particular computer.

The goal of the program is to detect slight signals that come from extremely dense, rapidly rotating pulsars, neutron stars or quark stars. The fast rotation and the shape of these dense stars can cause gravitational ripples that travel through the universe and can carry with them signals about their origins.

The potential payoff of the project is, well, cosmic.

"It would be the first ever detection of a rotating neutron star," Lazzarini.