Gravitational Wave Pulsars
Gravitational Wave Pulsars
[Single panel with Ponytail and Cueball standing facing each other] Ponytail: Ask me what the secret to detecting gravitational waves using pulsars is.
Cueball: What's the secret to detecting grav—
Ponytail: Timing!

Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, which have a very precise period of rotation. Pulsars are highly magnetized, causing a them to emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation that rotates across their sky. Radio astronomers can detect these beams if and when they point towards Earth, where they appear as pulses of radiation with highly stable periods. They use the pulsars' periodic beams to try to detect gravitational waves by tracking the rotation period of an ensemble of pulsars extremely precisely over long periods of time. Disturbances in the pulsars' rotation period will be measurable at Earth. A disturbance from a passing gravitational wave will have a particular signature across the ensemble of pulsars, and will be thus detected. The process is called "pulsar timing" , or just "timing" for short.
Ponytail presents this to Cueball as a joke - specifically, a joke about comedy. One of the most important aspects of comedy is revealing the punchline with correct timing. Ponytail sets Cueball up for a joke like, "Ask me what the secret of comedy is." / "What's the secret of--" / "Timing!" In this format, the punchline ("Timing!") deliberately comes too soon, which makes it funny because the timing is bad. Ponytail also replaces the secret to comedy with the secret to detecting gravitational waves with pulsars, to set up the joke about the word "timing".
The title text is a play on a well-known real estate saying that the three most important parts of a real estate deal are "location, location, location." In 3D Euclidean space , the three Cartesian coordinates {X, Y, Z} all refer to locations along the three axes.
[Single panel with Ponytail and Cueball standing facing each other] Ponytail: Ask me what the secret to detecting gravitational waves using pulsars is.
Cueball: What's the secret to detecting grav—
Ponytail: Timing!
