I have a quick question about gravitational waves. To my understanding, gravitat
ID: 2303824 • Letter: I
Question
I have a quick question about gravitational waves. To my understanding, gravitational waves are radiated by objects whose motion involves some sort of acceleration such as a binary system of two black holes orbiting each other. When the two objects orbit each other, they are emitting gravitational waves and these waves carry energy from the source and by conservation of energy, the binaries get tighter and spiral closer to each other so they travel faster and eventually because of orbital decay, they collapse into one other to form a super massive black hole. My question is, prior to the black holes collapsing, is there gravitational waves being propagated or is it only when they collapse? If gravitational waves are given off when two objects are only orbiting each other (not collapsing), does that mean when the earth orbits the sun, there’s gravitational waves being given off? Or is it given off only when the Earth falls into the Sun? Maybe I’m not completely understanding the conservation of energy part either. Please help. I have a quick question about gravitational waves. To my understanding, gravitational waves are radiated by objects whose motion involves some sort of acceleration such as a binary system of two black holes orbiting each other. When the two objects orbit each other, they are emitting gravitational waves and these waves carry energy from the source and by conservation of energy, the binaries get tighter and spiral closer to each other so they travel faster and eventually because of orbital decay, they collapse into one other to form a super massive black hole. My question is, prior to the black holes collapsing, is there gravitational waves being propagated or is it only when they collapse? If gravitational waves are given off when two objects are only orbiting each other (not collapsing), does that mean when the earth orbits the sun, there’s gravitational waves being given off? Or is it given off only when the Earth falls into the Sun? Maybe I’m not completely understanding the conservation of energy part either. Please help.Explanation / Answer
Look you have been correct in mosrt assumptions but you must understand the basics again. Gravitational waves are simply ripples or waves set off in space time fabric due to the accelerated motion of two massive bodies such as binary black holes. Yet their effect on obervable world might come out to be very little or small such as the case of the ones detected by LIGO recently which had really massive sources when compared to earth and sun yet they had effect equivalent to modifying the distance between earth and nearest star by the width of a human hair.
These waves are emitted during the deaccelerated motion of the binary systems or in the case earth's motion around sun. Even though technically earth is fallin into sun during it's orbital motion yet the duration for this event to occur is very large as the change in energy of motion is very little for earth's motion.
So, to be precise the waves are emitted when earth is orbitting the sun.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.