If you’re struggling, consider therapy with BetterHelp #ad. Click https://betterhelp.com/drbecky for a 10% discount on your first month of therapy with a credentialed professional specific to your needs. | Can gravitational waves interfere with each other? Either with constructive or deconstructive interference, just like water waves, sound waves, or light waves? They're waves yes, but they're not mechanical waves or electromagnetic waves like sound or light, so do they still behave like a wave?Thanks to the detections made by LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave detectors of neutron star mergers we now have some idea, but can we observe this in the future in black hole mergers? And what does this mean for a theory of quantum gravity and the force carrier the graviton?

Mitman et al. (2023; non-linear interference effects in black hole mergers)- https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1...
LIGO collaboration (2018; GW170817 detection with gamma rays) - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...

My previous video on how gravitational wave detectors work:    • Why can't LIGO detect mergers of supe...  
My previous video about the detection of huge gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays in 2023:    • Astrophysicist explains big GRAVITATI...  

General Relativity interactive visualisation - https://hiteshsahu.com/Relativity

00:00 - Introduction
02:51 - What are gravitational waves?
04:31 - What do we mean by "interference" for waves?
06:56 - How do we know that gravitational waves should interfere with each other (in theory)?
09:06 - What does this mean for a theory of quantum gravity?
11:00 - How can we test this with observations?
13:58 - Bloopers


Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV

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🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


http://drbecky.uk.com
https://rebeccasmethurst.co.uk