are there gravity waves, and can they be affected by gravity from another celestial body?

Answer 1

Sorry to be picky, but gravity waves are things like the waves on the sea - they definitely exist :-)

Gravitational waves are predicted by GR. There are tens of detectors currently in use, but so far no luck. They haven't been detected directly, but the 1993 Nobel Prize for physics went to Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr for their work on the Hulse-Taylor binary. This is a pulsar in a binary system which is losing energy through gravitational waves, precisely as GR predicts.

I don't know if they can be affected by gravity from another celestial body, but I suppose interference might be possible.

Answer 2

Nobody has yet detected gravity waves, but we're fairly sure they exist, and within a few years we expect to observe them experimentally. They are generated whenever you accelerate a massive object asymmetrically. The problem is they are extremely weak. The Earth moving in its orbit around the Sun only generates about a milliwatt of gravity waves. Probably the first gravity waves we observe will be from extremely violent events like a supernova or black holes colliding. The first attempt to observe them was made in the 1960s. A large block of aluminium weighing several tonnes was suspended in a quiet room and cooled to near absolute zero. If a gravity wave had been observed, the length of the cylinder would have changed by about the diameter of an atomic nucleus. An experiment being designed right now involves interference between two laser beams travelling through space at right angles to each other. Any gravity waves passing by will change the path length of the beams by a tiny amount, and you'd see movement of the interference fringes. Gravity waves are predicted by the General Theory of Relativity, which so far has passed every test; it's a reliable theory. Gravity waves are a tensor field; you need 20 numbers to describe one. Electromagnetic waves need only three numbers to describe them; they're a simple kind of tensor. So if we can ever generate gravity waves and detect them, they'll be an ideal way to communicate. They carry much more information than EM waves. Another advantage is, they can penetrate almost anything. You could send a beam of gravity waves from New Zealand to Britain through the centre of the Earth and it would be almost completely transparent.

Answer 3

Current theory says, no, gravity is not propagated by waves (like electromagnetic radiation is). Instead, gravity is essentially how we perceive and label the curvature of the space-time continuum that is caused by all objects with mass. But it is "true" that gravity is experienced as a sum total of the interactions of all celestial bodies. So, for example, technically speaking the planet's don't orbit the sun; rather, both the sun and the planets revolve around a point in between the two. Note, though, that gravity is proportional to the mass involved, so, in the case of bodies like the sun and the earth, the point around which both objects are rotating actually lies within the sun (but not at it's actual center).

Answer 4

Gravity waves... no. Then again, who is to say it is a wave or not when the physics behind gravity is still a mystery.

Generally speaking, gravity is a force. It is a weak force, but it's effect is far-reaching. One of the theories of gravity is that it is not affected by other bodies' gravity, but instead helps to compound the affect of all bodies' gravity. Hence, while Earth has gravity and the moon has gravity, our small system has a gravitational pull as a whole, rather than as two separate objects "screwing" with each other.

Answer 5

gravitational wave is a fluctuation in the curvature of spacetime which propagates as a wave, traveling outward from a moving object or system of objects. Gravitational radiation is the energy transported by these waves. Important examples of systems which emit gravitational waves are binary star systems, where the two stars in the binary are white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes.

Although gravitational radiation has not yet been directly detected, it has been indirectly shown to exist. This was the basis for the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for measurements of the Hulse-Taylor binary system.

(Gravitational waves are sometimes called gravity waves, but this term should be reserved for a completely different kind of wave encountered in hydrodynamics.)

Answer 6

I believe that gravity is a weak force, and better explained by by string theory. No waves that I know of.

"Affect" is a vague word. Do you mean bent like light? If so, I think that gravity will not be bent but added.

IMO, it needs more experimentation to answer fully.

Answer 7

I've read there are gravity waves and gravity wave detectors currently operating in many places in the world. Wikopedia.com, I think, has some info on this.

Answer 8

The doors close there.