AkanjisAfro
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 12 Oct 2014
- Messages
- 1,735
Yawn
So in a couple of sentences, just what is this post trying to say?
son asked me last night what would happen to us if the collision event that occurred was much closer to Earth than 19.4 billion light years away - would we all shimmer and become distorted whilst our atoms are pushed and pulled? would we survive? powerful enough to have brought sterling's contentious by line pass back into play? I'm stumped!
No, gravitational waves pass through matter which is how they were able to be detected underground and they're far far too weak to do things like this.
You have to remember that every piece of moving matter generates gravitational waves from black holes that we detected to a bird flying in the sky. Detecting them however has been like trying to detect a ripple from a dropped stone whilst sat on a cruise liner - there's a boatload of interference from natural and man made causes that make this extremely difficult and only by digging miles underground then completely reinventing suspension and movement calculation technology have they finally been able to detect something from the most gravitationally powerful event that humans can conceive of in terms of the collision of two black holes.
Gravity might keep the planets moving around the Sun but it is a spectacularly weak force for reasons that nobody is really sure of. When you pick up your mug of tea for example, your muscles defeat the entire gravitational pull of the Earth against that mug. Gravitational waves are just like ripples in the pond of spacetime, and we're like a big boat. We measured it by dumping two mountains into the pond and even then it was extremely difficult.
Very enlightening...Thanks
No, gravitational waves pass through matter which is how they were able to be detected underground and they're far far too weak to do things like this.
You have to remember that every piece of moving matter generates gravitational waves from black holes that we detected to a bird flying in the sky. Detecting them however has been like trying to detect a ripple from a dropped stone whilst sat on a cruise liner - there's a boatload of interference from natural and man made causes that make this extremely difficult and only by digging miles underground then completely reinventing suspension and movement calculation technology have they finally been able to detect something from the most gravitationally powerful event that humans can conceive of in terms of the collision of two black holes.
Gravity might keep the planets moving around the Sun but it is a spectacularly weak force for reasons that nobody is really sure of. When you pick up your mug of tea for example, your muscles defeat the entire gravitational pull of the Earth against that mug. Gravitational waves are just like ripples in the pond of spacetime, and we're like a big boat. We measured it by dumping two mountains into the pond and even then it was extremely difficult.