After seeing a great
animation put on Instagram by NASA, showing two neutron stars colliding and
emitting gravitational waves, I felt a sudden wave of curiosity to research
about it. After all, they caused such a big commotion earlier on, when their
existence was discovered, and the recent Nobel Prize in Physics was attributed
to the scientists who were behind the experiment at LIGO (Rainer Weiss, Barry
Barish and Kip Thorne).
In Einstein's theory of General Relativity, spacetime curves when mass is present and this deformation results in the force of Gravity being produced. The greater the curvature of spacetime, the greater the mass present and the greater the force of gravity. When the mass moves, the curvature changes to show the current location of the mass. So, when the mass accelerates through spacetime, given that it isn't moving spherically symmetrically or rotationally symmetrically (like a spinning disc), will produce gravitational waves, which propagate in spacetime almost like electromagnetic waves. They follow the Inverse Square Law, have amplitude, frequency and wavelength and even travel at the speed of light!
The effect of a gravitational wave passing by will increase and decrease the distance between other objects and ourselves rhythmically. Just try and picture this in your head, this sort of distortion to spacetime. Crazy, right? However, due to the fact that they follow the Inverse Square Law, having travelled billions of light years to reach us, the gravitational waves will only have enough intensity to stretch things by a ten thousandth of the width of a proton. That's basically the same as adding a hair's width to the distance from here to the next star on from the Solar System. So, the effects will be much, much less adverse than we first imagine.
An example of what it could be caused by a binary system. If two planets are moving in circular orbits around each other, they produce gravitational waves due to their circular motion causing them to have an acceleration perpendicular to their motion. So, as they are accelerating masses, they emit gravitational waves. There is a minute loss in energy through this emission in waves, which could someday result in the planets colliding into each other but this loss is so small compared to how much total energy the two planets would have so they approach each other very slowly. This was the case with the gravitational waves that were detected in the LIGO experiment, except, instead of planets, there were neutron stars.
In Einstein's theory of General Relativity, spacetime curves when mass is present and this deformation results in the force of Gravity being produced. The greater the curvature of spacetime, the greater the mass present and the greater the force of gravity. When the mass moves, the curvature changes to show the current location of the mass. So, when the mass accelerates through spacetime, given that it isn't moving spherically symmetrically or rotationally symmetrically (like a spinning disc), will produce gravitational waves, which propagate in spacetime almost like electromagnetic waves. They follow the Inverse Square Law, have amplitude, frequency and wavelength and even travel at the speed of light!
The effect of a gravitational wave passing by will increase and decrease the distance between other objects and ourselves rhythmically. Just try and picture this in your head, this sort of distortion to spacetime. Crazy, right? However, due to the fact that they follow the Inverse Square Law, having travelled billions of light years to reach us, the gravitational waves will only have enough intensity to stretch things by a ten thousandth of the width of a proton. That's basically the same as adding a hair's width to the distance from here to the next star on from the Solar System. So, the effects will be much, much less adverse than we first imagine.
An example of what it could be caused by a binary system. If two planets are moving in circular orbits around each other, they produce gravitational waves due to their circular motion causing them to have an acceleration perpendicular to their motion. So, as they are accelerating masses, they emit gravitational waves. There is a minute loss in energy through this emission in waves, which could someday result in the planets colliding into each other but this loss is so small compared to how much total energy the two planets would have so they approach each other very slowly. This was the case with the gravitational waves that were detected in the LIGO experiment, except, instead of planets, there were neutron stars.
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