You are browsing the archive for gravity waves Archives - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
12 February 2016
Why The Discovery of Gravity Waves is BIG News
Today’s announcement about gravity waves is REALLY big news. Not because it confirmed Einstein, but because we can now detect something we could not before. When we learned to detect radio waves, the world changed. Detecting X rays lead to amazing advances in medicine and seeing Infrared light lead to cameras that can see at night, along with the ability to measure temperatures, and detect elements on stars and planets. …
11 February 2016
Einstein’s Gravity Waves Are Real
The American Physical Society has a good write up on the gravity wave discovery announced today here. AP Science writer Seth Borenstein has some background as well. The actual published paper is here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 More on how LIGO works here:
22 January 2015
Gravity Wave Ripples on The Satellite
The wave clouds on this image over Virginia are caused by winds flowing over the mountains. As the winds lift they form a cloud, and as they fall back down the air warms and dries out (and the cloud dissipates). These ripples happen because the air is fairly stable and does not want to go too high or low from its original height. So, after it goes over the mountains …
2 July 2014
Arthur’s Ripples
You may need to click on the image above to really see the ripples across the top of Arthur, so do that first, before I tell you why they are there. You are looking at gravity waves, but a better way of understanding it is to compare it to the ripples you see after you throw a rock into a still pond. The rock disturbs the water and makes …
26 November 2012
Gravity Waves Are Not Something You Only Hear About On Doctor Who
We had a nice display of gravity waves over the Mid Atlantic on Saturday. You have likely seen this type of cloud pattern in the sky many times and the view from the Aqua satellite as it passed over Virginia on Saturday shows it well. In many waves this is the atmospheric equivalent of throwing a rock in a pond. Instead of a series of waves emanating from the spot …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.