Catch a gravitational wave, dude! (The Space Place).

Publication: The Technology Teacher

Publication Date: 01-FEB-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 International Technology Education Association

If you're a surfer, you're amped when you spot a dune coming into shore. Rain or shine, you can't wait to catch a pumping bump and drop in late. But while you're getting aerial, stuffed, or wiped out you probably aren't thinking about where those waves are coming from. You just don't want a gnarley wave to get you clucked.

Well, whether gnarley or shore-dump, waves are created by ocean disturbances far out at sea. Storms or other atmospheric conditions disturb the fluid mound of water that flows over our planet. These large disturbances ripple through the ocean currents, carrying waves--large and small--to faraway shores. But did you know that there are disturbances in space that cause waves? Yes, there are waves in space itself!

The type of space-travelling waves we now know most about are electromagnetic waves (radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays, visible light, and more). But, there is another type of space waves we don't know much about--gravitational waves. In fact we haven't detected one yet. We didn't know anything about gravitational waves until Albert Einstein predicted their existence in 1916.

Albert's Warped Ideas

Albert Einstein was a great scientist who figured out many new things about the Universe. One of his ideas was that objects cause the space around them to be warped or curved. Picture a bowling ball sitting on a soft mattress. The heavy ball would cause the mattress to sag. A marble placed on this bowling-ball-laden mattress might roll right into the ball.

In Einstein's picture of the Universe, the mattress is three-dimensional space. The space around a large object or mass, like a planet or the Sun, is so curved that other objects passing nearby follow the curvature and end up in orbit around the planet or the Sun.

And this is what gravity is all about! Gravity is the warping of space around a mass. The part of space that is warped around the mass is its gravitational field. Other objects inside this field, such as your body on Earth's surface, or the moon in orbit around Earth, or Earth in orbit around the Sun, influence and are influenced by this gravitational field. The more massive the object, the more it warps space, and the more gravitational influence it has on anything near...

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