BitBOINC

🔭 New project in the works: Kampylos, hunting binary-lens gravitational microlensing solutions 🔭

Different from everything else here -- no Bitcoin, no cryptography puzzle, actual astrophysics. Kampylos exhaustively models binary-lens gravitational microlensing events: a background star's light gets bent and brightened by a foreground pair of masses (two stars, or a star and a planet), and figuring out exactly what that foreground pair looks like from the light curve alone is a real, still-open computational problem.

🌌 The catch: fitting one of these events properly means searching over the lens's mass ratio and separation, and that search can't be shortcut the usual way -- different values genuinely change the shape of the solution space, so it has to be scanned, not guessed at. Public sky surveys (OGLE, MOA, KMTNet) have alerted on tens of thousands of these events since the 1990s, and a full, exhaustive search has never been run across anywhere near all of them -- it's normally too expensive for any one research group to do for every event. That's exactly the kind of gap donated volunteer compute is good for.

📊 Results (the full solution maps, not just whichever answer looks best) will be published openly on Zenodo, and anything scientifically notable will go to Research Notes of the AAS.

🚧 Status: in development, not sending work yet -- the search engine is built on VBMicrolensing (the standard tool real microlensing groups use for this, not something homemade) and is currently going through correctness testing. It's listed on the Applications page as beta so you can see it coming. I'll post here the moment real work units go out.

Thanks for your patience -- questions welcome below. 🙏

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Very cool to see other applications/underprojects too. Keep up the good stuff :)

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