3 ms·

Just curious, if we have gravitational waves, what are the wave lengths?

• queuebert 5y ago
  The orbital period of the merging objects is ~ 1 ms near the end, and gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light, so I'd estimate that the wavelength would be ~ 3e5 x 1e-3, or in the neighborhood of hundreds of kilometers.
• ww520 5y ago
  That depends the period of the body’s movement. The wave is generated by the body’s movement.
  • markus_zhang 5y ago
    OK I probably got some wild thoughts. I was thinking, since light has different wave lengths and human can't see many types of light because of that, maybe dark matter is similar? Just some uneducated thoughts lol.
    • ww520 5y ago
      But it’s a very good question. It leads to what’s the nature of gravitational wave. The frequency is certainly a key characteristic. It can lead to how LIGO works.
    • bil7 5y ago
      radios or other technology can be used to detect EM wavelengths humans can't. No tech can currently observe dark matter
• foo92691 5y ago
  There is no upper limit to the wavelength of gravitational waves. However, the lowest frequency that we can currently detect is around 10-100 Hz. Diving the speed of light (3e8 m/s) by (10 Hz) gives 3e7 meters. 30,000 km. The upper end of our frequency range is currently around 8 kHz which corresponds to 37.5 km if I did the math right. LISA will be sensitive to much lower frequencies (longer wavelengths). NanoGrav also searches for these lower frequency signals. We expect most gw's to be of very low frequency. High frequency g.w.s require tremendous mass and acceleration to generate. They are only generated in the final moments of black hole collisions as far as we know.