Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Detecting Gravitational Waves with Pulsar Timing -
Dealing with the Turbulent Interstellar Medium

Dan Stinebring

Oberlin College

The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is an effort by Canadian and US scientists to detect gravitational waves from orbiting supermassive black hole binaries (SMBH) by high precision pulsar timing. I will review the current status of our effort and discuss one challenge in detail: how do we correct for a variety of time-variable delays due to propagation through the ionized interstellar medium? I will start by discussing early papers in this field including Kaspi and Stinebring (1992) and Kaspi, Taylor, and Ryba (1994).