Tuesday, 14 March 2017

Gravitational waves.

Today, in college I had done an experiment related to waves. It was calculating the frequency of given tuning fork.

And.... Gravitational waves?? Yeah let's talk about that... First question is "how do they form?"


To understand this let us take a few examples...
Take a stick and move the stick back and forth in water they form waves..
The music coming out of your mobile.. they form waves...
In a cell tower, the electrons moving back and forth cause radio waves

Similarly, in space stars, planets or any other objects moving back and forth cause "Gravitational waves"

"How can you detect a Gravitational wave?"

There are at present only two observatories located on earth called LIGO(Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatorie) located at Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington. But how do they detect the gravitational waves?

Let me answer,.

When you form a wave in water, they cause a disturbance in the height of the water level. A sound wave causes a disturbance in the pressure of the air.
 Similarly in the case of Gravitational waves the gravitational energy increases and decreases on the bodies..

 They use laser beams to calculate  the distance between two objects as shown in the figure....




When the wave reflects back, the calculate the distance between them. But due to the gravitational waves we find that the distance between them increases and decreases. Thus they detect Gravitational waves.

And this is ANIRUDH DASARI signing off.





No comments: