This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, currently the working model of gravity, predicts the existence of ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves, though these have yet to be directly detected. One method of doing so is with a class of objects known as pulsars, rapidly spinning stellar remnants that emit a beam of radiation, creating a lighthouse-like effect. When the beam passes our line-of-sight, we observe a pulse that can be timed with extreme precision; the fastest pulsars spin every few milliseconds and the pulses of some can be timed to a precision of tens of nanoseconds after traveling thousands of lightyears to reach us. As gravitational waves pass between the Earth and the pulsar, spacetime expands and contracts, thus changing the distance and therefore the times-of-arrival of the pulses. By measuring the changes in the times-of-arrival of the pulses, we hope to make direct detections of gravitational waves in order to study the Universe gravitationally, rather than electromagnetically with light. I will discuss how we build our galaxy-wide observatory with pulsars and the two largest, single-dish radio telescopes on Earth, the current challenges and advances in our scientific understanding of pulsar timing, and the science we hope to learn about in detecting gravitational waves as we reach this new frontier of astronomy.

Though born and raised in New York City, Michael's love for astronomy at a young age came in large part from seeing the dark skies of central New York. Michael spent the last seven years in central New York, graduating from Colgate University in 2011, where he studied Astronomy-Physics and Computer Science, and attending Cornell University currently. As a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy, he works with Professor James Cordes and is a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves and the International Pulsar Timing Array collaborations. He has been a teaching assistant in a number of introductory level physics, astronomy, and computer science courses, and has been a part of various outreach programs at both universities, now working as an officer of the Astronomy Grads Network at Cornell. During undergrad, he was a member of the Men's Cross Country and Track and Field program, competing in distance events. Most of his free time now is devoted to training for races of all distances with various running clubs in the Ithaca area.

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