“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” -Hermann Minkowski
When you think of waves, chances are you think of some type of pressure wave moving through a medium, like sound or water waves, or you think of light, which is an electromagnetic wave that requires no medium to move through. But there’s another type of wave that exists, that no one expected before Einstein came along: gravitational waves.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user MOBle.
It’s very counterintuitive how these waves come to exist, and yet, this week — at the behest of Starts With A Bang reader Adam Rabung — we do our best to explain just what the heck a gravitational wave is, how we know they exist, and how we plan on finding them.
Image credit: NASA (L), Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy / Michael Kramer, viahttp://www.mpg.de/7644757/W002_Physics-Astronomy_048-055.pdf.
Don’t miss this week’s Ask Ethan, only on Starts With A Bang at Medium!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/18VP4MD
“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” -Hermann Minkowski
When you think of waves, chances are you think of some type of pressure wave moving through a medium, like sound or water waves, or you think of light, which is an electromagnetic wave that requires no medium to move through. But there’s another type of wave that exists, that no one expected before Einstein came along: gravitational waves.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user MOBle.
It’s very counterintuitive how these waves come to exist, and yet, this week — at the behest of Starts With A Bang reader Adam Rabung — we do our best to explain just what the heck a gravitational wave is, how we know they exist, and how we plan on finding them.
Image credit: NASA (L), Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy / Michael Kramer, viahttp://www.mpg.de/7644757/W002_Physics-Astronomy_048-055.pdf.
Don’t miss this week’s Ask Ethan, only on Starts With A Bang at Medium!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/18VP4MD
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