The solution to this would be near light speed or faster light speed travel. One being that spacecrafts are not fast enough to reach destinations and hence it takes extremely a long time.
But I’ll leave that for another time.Background: As man aims to go beyond the reach of the solar system, technologies that are capable of achieving such distances pose serious problems.
But even though we haven’t detected them directly, we know they exist because of the way binary pulsars behave. There’s been a great deal of effort to detect gravitational waves this way, but so far we haven’t succeeded. In the picture above I’ve drawn what would happen to a ring of small masses as a simple gravity wave passes by (although I’ve made the effect much larger than it actually is). We can’t see gravity waves, but we should be able to see their effect. Even if we couldn’t see the water, the bobbing of the water bug would tell us the wave was there. If we imagine a little water bug on our pond, we know it would bob up and down as the wave flows past it. Since gravitational disturbances propagate at a finite speed there must be gravity waves. There’s a speed to that spactime propagation, and it happens to be the speed of light.
#Gravity waves faster than light how to
In general relativity matter tells spacetime how to bend, and spacetime tells matter how to move.īut if you disturb spacetime by moving masses around, that disturbance takes time to propagate. That space is curved by the mass of the sun. Our little planet doesn’t orbit the sun because its getting instant messages, it orbits the sun because the space it travels through is curved. In general relativity gravity is not an action over distance, but a bending of space and time. The solution to this problem is of course Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Special relativity says that nothing should travel faster than light, so how could gravity act instantly over large distances. If it took time for the gravity of the sun to travel to earth, our planet would be attracted to where the sun was, not where it is, and our planet would go flying off into an unstable orbit.īut this leaves us with a bit of a problem. Since Newton’s gravity acts at a distance, it has to act instantly. Newton held that gravity acted instantly. In Newton’s universe, there’s no such thing as a gravity wave. The speed of that disturbance is what we call the speed of light. Disturb an electromagnetic field, and it takes time for that disturbance to spread. And light makes waves for the same reason. Still, if you make a flash of light, the waves spread out in all directions just like our pebble in a pond. Light doesn’t need a material to travel through. Light waves (electromagnetic waves for those who like precision) are a bit different. That “speed of water” varies depending on the depth of the water and other factors, but it is never instantaneous. The energy of the displacement moves through the water at a particular speed. The displaced water moves outward, which pushes water further out, which pushes water even further out, and so on. Waves occur in water because it takes time for the water displaced by the pebble to push against the surrounding water. Drop a pebble in a calm pond and you can watch the waves spread out over the surface of the water. When most people think of waves they typically think of water waves. Hurt/Caltech- JPL An artist’s impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars.
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