Gravity by Timothy Clifton

Author:Timothy Clifton [Clifton, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191045332
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

The effect of a gravitational wave

To try and make sense of what a gravitational wave is, it might be useful to consider what its effects should be on a group of objects as it passes through them. For example, if you were trying to describe the waves on a pond to an alien who wasn’t familiar with water, you might start by suggesting that the effect of the wave is to make the lilies on the surface of the pond move up and down in a smooth, repetitive way. Let us consider the corresponding situation with gravitational waves.

Let’s start by considering a uniform cloud of gas floating in space. This removes the effect of the Earth’s own gravitational field, which is many times stronger than any gravitational wave that we are ever likely to see, as well as removing any disturbance the gas might feel from interacting with anything else. If the gravitational wave travels through the cloud of gas, as in Figure 8, then the principal effect of the wave is to displace the gas in the directions transverse to its direction of propagation. That is, if the wave travels from left to right, then the particles in the gas are displaced up and down, and in and out of the plane of the page.

8. An illustration of a wave passing through a cloud of gas. The wave travels from left to right, and displaces the particles of gas up-and-down, and in-and-out of the plane of the page.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.