Daniel Whiteson

Because the neutron star is spinning and the magnetic field is spinning, it's precessing.

And sometimes it passes over the earth.

And so you get a blip of that beam and then it goes away.

Then you get a blip of the beam when it comes back around.

So those are the pulses of a pulsar.

And they're incredible because they're super duper precise.

Like they rotate with an amazing regularity.

Sometimes they take a second to spin.

Millisecond pulsars are these incredibly fast spinning stars that every millisecond we get a beep from them.

And

There's great stories about their discovery.

You know, they saw them in the sky, and they thought, what is this thing beeping at us, right?

Is this aliens?

Are these the aliens?

I think Tesla misunderstood pulsars as a message at some point.

Oh, okay, cool.

So how do you use those to detect stuff?

Yeah, so they are clocks.

They're clocks out in the universe, and gravitational waves are distortions in space and time, right?

They are ripples in space-time, and so...