Drop an anvil off a cliff, and the speed of the anvil at the bottom can be used to reconstruct the “potential” energy that falling off the cliff can impart.īut in general relativity, where spacetime is stretched and squashed in different directions depending on the motions of bodies, a potential dictates more than just the potential energy at a location-it dictates the shape of spacetime. In simple Newtonian terms, a gravitational potential measures how much energy an object would gain if it fell from a certain height. ![]() So, too, does the property responsible for the memory effect: the gravitational potential. But a gravitational wave has a longer reach than the force of gravity. The objects that LIGO detects are so far away, their gravitational pull is negligibly weak.
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