To answer what gravitational waves are, we must travel back in time to 1916. This was the year famous physicist Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity. Einstein had figured out how to explain gravity within the Universe using maths. Gravity is the force that keeps us on Earth and Earth orbiting around the Sun.
Until 1916, there had been many theories to try and explain what gravity was and why it exists. But Einstein suggested that gravity was the bending of something called space-time. You can think of space-time like the fabric of the Universe. It’s what makes up the space we live in. Without it, we wouldn’t have a Universe, and that wouldn’t be very fun.
A space-time trampoline
Curved space-time is responsible for the effects of gravity. A trampoline is an excellent way for us to picture this on a flat surface. Imagine you place a heavy bowling ball in the center of a trampoline — its mass bends the fabric, and it creates a dip. Now, if we tried to roll a marble across the trampoline, it would roll inward and around the bowling ball. That’s all gravity is, the distortion of the space-time fabric, affecting how things move.
This is what Einstein’s famous equations helped to explain — how we can expect space-time to move under different conditions. We know that in the Universe, nothing stands still. Everything is constantly moving, and when objects speed up through space-time, they can create small ripples, just like a pebble in a pond. These ripples are what we call gravitational waves. Our Universe is likely full of these tiny waves, like an ocean with waves moving in all different directions.
But unlike the ocean, gravitational waves are tiny and won’t be rocking Earth about. When first predicted by Einstein, he doubted if we’d ever be able to detect them because of how teeny tiny they should be. I would love to know what he would think today. Not only have we seen gravitational waves, but we’ve detected 90 unique events! This is one of the most significant achievements in physics, and how they did it was nothing short of amazing.
Squeeze and stretch
When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it squeezes or stretches the whole planet in the direction it travels. If we tried to measure it with something like a ruler, the ruler would appear to be the same length because the numbers on the ruler would also be stretched or squeezed and wouldn’t change.
But scientists have a trick: They can use light because light can only travel a certain distance over a specific time. So if space is stretched out, the light must travel a little farther and take longer. Vice versa for when space is squeezed. The trick to knowing if space has been compressed or stretched is to measure it in two directions and calculate the difference. Unfortunately for us, it isn’t easy to measure.
The difference in the distance we’re looking for is 1,000 times smaller than a tiny particle called a proton. To blow your mind, your body has around 10 octillion protons (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). It’s an insanely small change we needed to detect, but thankfully, clever scientists and engineers figured out a way to do it, and you can learn more about these detectors in the video above.
Gravitational waves have given us new eyes to our Universe, allowing us to “see” things like black holes and neutron stars crashing together — because we can finally detect the tiny ripples they create.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Please read the original article.
Sara Webb, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology.
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