Can't you radiate potential gravitational energy as gravitational waves without any sort of particle changes, because potential gravitational energy is stored i

Can't you radiate potential gravitational energy as gravitational waves without any sort of particle changes, because potential gravitational energy is stored in the configuration of the system? If I drop my bowling ball, it has lower potential energy, but can't some of that be compensated for by the Earth-ball system radiating a gravitational wave (rather than all being converted into kinetic energy)? Similarly, don't orbiting bodies emit gravitational waves? I forget the exact dynamics, but the way that they drag just a little bit as they orbit creates waves that radiate power out of the system -- I think the Sun and Jupiter radiate something like 55 watts of gravitational waves. If you take two things that are each tens of times larger than the Sun and set them spinning an appreciable amount of the speed of light very nearby -- to the point they eventually collide -- it's not surprising they emit quite a bit more than our solar system. Think of it this way: Two large objects start orbiting slowly far apart. But because they're large and the system is big, they have a lot of orbital momentum. They pull each other close, but as they get closer, that orbital momentum has nowhere to dissipate, so they orbit faster and faster!... ...Except that because they're so massive, they slightly tug space around with them as they orbit. And because they're orbiting so fast, space doesn't have a good way to smooth itself out. So some of the momentum from the heavy things spinning far apart gets stored in wrinkles in space as they come together. Which then radiates away from there to us, ...and slightly stretches one direction of reality as it passes by. Which we detect by measuring how long two perpendicular lines are very accurately a few different places on a nearly spherical object. ...So you can model it as just the way that mass interacts with spacetime if you remember to include things like the distribution of your mass as a source of potential energy that can itself be used to generate gravitational waves. However, this does not make the whole situation any less weird to explain. Reports just tend to convert the amount of energy released through mechanisms like that in terms of mass, because it's the only thing vaguely comprehensible. (eg, 3 suns)