If you’re reading this post, you’ve undoubtedly seen at least one diagram like the above — a black hole or a planet or a bowling ball makes a dent in a rubber sheet and that’s supposed to explain Gravity.  But it doesn’t, and neither does this spirally screen-grab from Brian Greene’s presentation on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show:

<Blush> I have to admit that the graphic I used a couple of weeks ago is just as bad.

Gravitational waves don’t make things go up and down like ocean waves, and they’re definitely not like that planet on a trampoline — after all, there’s nothing “below” to pull things downward so there can’t be a dent.  And gravitational waves don’t do spirals, much.

Of all the wave varieties we’re familiar with, gravitational waves are most similar to (NOT identical with!!) sound waves.  A sound wave consists of cycles of compression and expansion like you see in this graphic.  Those dots could be particles in a gas (classic “sound waves”) or in a liquid (sonar) or neighboring atoms in a solid (a xylophone or marimba).

Contrary to rumor, there can be sound in space, sort of.  Any sizable volume of “empty” space contains at least a few atoms and dust particles.  A nova or similar sudden event can sweep particles together and give rise to successive waves that spread as those local collections bang into particles further away.  That kind of activity is invoked in some theories of spiral galaxy structure and the fine details of Saturn’s rings.

In a gravitational wave, space itself is compressed and stretched.  A particle caught in a gravitational wave doesn’t get pushed back and forth.  Instead, it shrinks and expands in place.  If you encounter a gravitational wave, you and all your calibrated measurement gear (yardsticks, digital rangers, that slide rule you’re so proud of) shrink and expand together.  You’d only notice the experience if you happened to be comparing two extremely precise laser rangers set perpendicular to each other (LIGO!).  One would briefly register a slight change compared to the other one.

Light always travels at 186,000 miles per second but in a compressed region of space those miles are shorter.  Einstein noticed that implication of his Theory of General Relativity and in 1916 predicted that the path of starlight would be bent when it passed close to a heavy object like the Sun.  The graphic shows a wave front passing through a static gravitational structure.  Two points on the front each progress at one graph-paper increment per step.  But the increments don’t match so the front as a whole changes direction.  Sure enough, three years after Einstein’s prediction, Eddington observed just that effect while watching a total solar eclipse in the South Atlantic.

Unlike the Sun’s steady field, a gravitational wave is dynamic. Gravitational waves are generated by changes in a mass configuration.  The wave’s compression and stretching forces spread out through space.

Here’s a simulation of the gravitational forces generated by two black holes orbiting into a collision.  The contours show the net force felt at each point in the region around the pair.
We’re being dynamic here, so the simulation has to include the fact that changes in the mass configuration aren’t felt everywhere instantaneously.  Einstein showed that space transmits gravitational waves at the speed of light, so I used a scaled “speed of light” in the calculation.  You can see how each of the new features expands outward at a steady rate.

Even near the violent end, the massive objects move much more slowly than light speed.  The variation in their nearby field quickly smooths out to an oval and then a circle about the central point, which is why the calculated gravity field generates no spiral like the ones in the pretty pictures.

Oh, and those “gravity well” pictures?  They’re not showing gravitational fields, they’re really gravitational potential energy diagrams, showing how hard it’d be to get away from somewhere.  In the top video, for example, the satellite orbits the planet because it doesn’t have enough kinetic energy to get out of the well.  The more massive the attractor, the tighter it curves space around itself and the deeper the well.

~~ Rich Olcott