I don't know if we've discovered enough about the subject but I got a few questions about the gravitational waves

> 4km long corridor
so its the wave shape is 1 atom wide and 4km long ? How the hell do you even detect such small movement.
> D:
coz if we knew how to block it, we might have came up with an anti-gravity device :B

>so its the wave shape is 1 atom wide and 4km long ?

No. It propagates in all directions. So it's "shape" is a sphere I guess.

>How the hell do you even detect such small movement.

Very carefully calibrated lasers.

>coz if we knew how to block it, we might have came up with an anti-gravity device :B

And also a perpetual motion machine...

>How the hell do you even detect such small movement.
By pointing a laser down 2 of these corridors at different angles and measuring the difference between how long it takes the beam to bounce along it a few hundred times

I'm not the op but I have a question.

Do gravity waves stretch/shrink time-space?

Thats what gravity does so yes

give me a source.
btw, I mean shrink/stretch in the sense ofsparknotes.com/math/algebra2/operationsonfunctions/section2.rhtml

Im no good at the math so I cant help you

The reason I pointed that out, is because I recall reading that gravity "distorts" spacetime. not stretch/shrink it.

To stretch shrink space-time would be to change f(x).y's derivative such that there would integrate a different sum of elements of the set y. "fitting more/less y in x"

This implies that we can space-time travel. Fold space.
It also implies that time has a set.

This is wrong. Gravitational waves, similar to electromagnetic waves are created by [math]accelerating[/math] bodies, no just ones moving relative to you.

>Why are gravitational waves work as oscillating waves and not a constant

Because there's no such thing as "constant waves."

Gravitational waves are just like* electromagnetic waves - you jiggle a charge (a mass) around, and since information can travel no faster than c, that jiggle creates a "kink" in the field that propagates outward. Think of it sort of like shaking one end of a rope: The rope isn't rigid, so instead of the other end moving with it directly, a wave ripples down to the other end.

*Because antigravity doesn't exist, but positive and negative charges do, you have to shake it in a somewhat different way: To generate electromagnetic waves from a system of charges you need to change a feature of the arrangement called the dipole moment, so just moving charges back and forth counts; there's no such thing as a gravitational dipole, so you need to change the "quadrupole moment", so spinning two masses around each other or rotating a dumbbell-shaped mass distribution does the job.

>What type of energy source are these waves originating from ?

Large masses oscillating, just like electromagnetic waves come from charges oscillating**. The ones LIGO observed came from two black holes orbiting around each other really fast, but if you spin a dumbbell around you're also generating undetectably weak gravitational waves.

**Gravitational waves are probably made up of gravitons the same way electromagnetic waves are made of photons, but the ores we've observed are too long-wavelength to act quantum and nobody knows how to make quantum gravity work.

>Why isn't gravity just a static force ?

Because masses can move.

Where x is gravity and y is time-space.

>gravity is variable with respect to it's own function = y
>gravity waves!
>y values of gravity over the trigonemetric functions

>Whats the speed of gravitational waves ?

c. Not because they have anything to do with light, but because waves in anything without mass will travel at c. It's built into the structure of space-time, not a feature of light specifically.

>Are they a type of EM force ?

Nope! Gravity waves are waves in the gravitational field, EM waves are waves in the electromagnetic field.

>Is there a way to visualize these waves ?

Yes. See this gif:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GravitationalWave_PlusPolarization.gif

As a gravitational wave travels through spacetime, stuff in its path stretches and squeezes like that. (The ring is circular; spacetime is what's stretching and squeezing.) Imagine a giant stack of those .gifs coming out of your screen, each layer in the stack delayed by one frame from the one before.

However, because gravity is ridiculously weak and spacetime incredibly stiff, that gif is super exaggerated; the gravitational wave detected at LIGO was so cataclysmically powerful that, if it was light, it would have outshone the combined power of every star in the universe ... but only stretched and squeezed the 4-km-long LIGO arms by a deviation of 1/10000th the width of a proton.

So instead imagine jack shit, because that's more accurate for all intents and purposes.

>Is there a way to cancel out or block these waves ?

Nope. That would require the existence of negative "gravitational charge", aka negative mass.

Since gravitational waves are so weak it took half a century of increasingly expensive experiments to detect them, though, why bother? Just don't spend billions of dollars building a ridiculously sensitive interferometer four kilometers to a side, and you'll never notice any effects.

In case you're confused, there IS "static gravity", the same way there's static electrical and magnetic fields - it's what you feel every day that make stuff fall down and keeps stuff in orbit. Like with EM, you have to jiggle them to make waves.

>Hi