Re: Gravity waves

Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Fri, 16 Jul 1999 20:23:52 +0100

Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Thu, 15 Jul 1999 23:50:22 -0400

>Ocean/lake waves do not get their energy from gravity. They get it from
>>sustained winds or from earthquakes.

The seismologists are interested in several kinds of waves, acoustic waves, for which pressure is the restoring force, gravity waves, for which buoyancy is the restoring force, and surface gravity waves.

Keeping track of all of these waves can get really complicated in objects like stars. See: http://soi.stanford.edu/results/heliowhat.html

Now about gravitational waves, you may be interested in this:

THE DETECTION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
http://www.gravity.pd.uwa.edu.au/DetGW/DetGW.htm

The document exists in rtf format. The following is from there.

The idea about gravitational waves are that gravitational charges exist analogous to electric charges. But the gravitational radiation is very weak, and it will be observed far from the emitting region. And because there is no physical way to distinguish between the inertial and gravitational acceleration of a single test mass, only relative accelerations ("tidal") between two or more masses can be attributed to gravitational fields.

Also some other physical situations may produce detectable gravitational radiation: asymmetric collapse of massive objects, such as the formation of massive black holes from stellar collisions and coalesence in globular clusters and in galactic nuclei.

Amara


Amara Graps               | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543          | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps

"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke