Is Gravity Faster Than Light?

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
Consider the scenario;

We're all sitting here on Earth revolving around the Sun and it suddenly disappears. It takes the light 7:33, give or take, for us to realize this has happened. So my question is, would we feel the effect of the loss of the Suns gravity on the Earth before the light stopped coming? If so, did I just discover something faster than light in our universe?


:mrgreen:
 

Xrtnfx

Active Member
Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than lightspeed. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has no detectable aberration or propagation delay for its action, even for cases (such as binary pulsars) where sources of gravity accelerate significantly during the light time from source to target.

If you enjoyed that, you might want to read the whole thing http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
 

XxHazexX

Well-Known Member
Consider the scenario;

We're all sitting here on Earth revolving around the Sun and it suddenly disappears. It takes the light 7:33, give or take, for us to realize this has happened. So my question is, would we feel the effect of the loss of the Suns gravity on the Earth before the light stopped coming? If so, did I just discover something faster than light in our universe?

:mrgreen:
Sounds plausible because the sun is the only thing thats keeping us from absolute destruction.With out the suns gravitational pull we'd go flying out in into the universe.
The gravitational pull would most like give right away:confused::confused:
 

Dirty Harry

Well-Known Member
Does it matter? Either way, humanity is fooked. What comes first won't matter because no one will be around to answer it.
Worry more about life than death. That just may make life worth the ride.
 

eastsidebagel

Active Member
My answer to all this is: Boy, do I feel over-tired and idiotic sitting in front of my computer in my pyjamas considering this question right now! :)

I dunno, maybe gravity is as fast as light?
 

XxHazexX

Well-Known Member
Does it matter? Either way, humanity is fooked. What comes first won't matter because no one will be around to answer it.
Worry more about life than death. That just may make life worth the ride.
with out death Life would'ent be as exciteing.So why not question death unless you have all the anwsers for us...
 

CreepyStevie69

Well-Known Member
that movie answered the question exactly... at the 8 minute excerpt it says we wouldnt float off right away and the gravitational pull will move as fast as the speed of light. so when the light ends is when we will start floating off.
 

NLXSK1

Well-Known Member
As far as our understanding goes, gravity is everywhere.

You cannot just eliminate matter from the universe including the sun. However, if you were somehow able to remove the sun we would likely start flying off in a straight line the instant the sun was removed from existence.
 

CreepyStevie69

Well-Known Member
im not going to repeat myself any more... the answer is gravity moves just as fast as light. therefore we wouldnt fly off into space right away.
 

rollinronan

Well-Known Member
well given it just dissapeared...the we would just float off into darkness and the sun would appear to move in the sky at a strange angle..it would take many weeks for us to die starting with plants then herbibores and so on

as for some of the other comments
gravity and light are largely misunderstood.... it is not even close to being fully understood in the scientific community...infact most of what we know about it is theoretical , it is believed that gravity is spread over many dimentions and that accounts for its apparent weakness in comparison to say magnitisim
and light changes its properties (this is due to wave-particle duality , google it)
also you cannot say that gravity or light or anything else has a defined speed (unless in a vacum) as it is dependent on the medium (for light) or mass of the objects (for gravity) gravity can also affect light, bending and distorting it over large distances
it is even possible with recently emerging technology to stop light inside a crystal by altering it with a magnetic field

what it comes down to is that gravity is an attractive force
and light is something that it acts apon as much as an apple
light moves so fast that it has verry little effect, until you come to the likes of a black hole (witch has been proven to exist in most galaxies including our own) once past the event horison the gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape eg. on earth gravity is meaured at 9.81m s-2 at a black hole it becomes many many millions of times this due to its emmence density (imagine our sun squashed into the eye of a pin ) hence why light cannot escape

to shorten all that - light moves.....movement is measured in.....meters per second
- gravity is an attractive force....force is measured in.....newtons
you cannot say witch is faster as gravity doesnot move....the projectile does

i hope this clears things up

sorry fer babbleing on....kinda baked!
 

Uncultivated

Well-Known Member
No, we wouldn't feel it for 7 minutes or whatever. While some processes can indeed propogate faster than the speed of light, per special relativity no information or energy can be transmitted faster than c, and the earth's orbit changing would definitely be informing us of something!
 

rollinronan

Well-Known Member
yes but we wouldn't notice for a while
tackion particles cant move slower than light (but they are also theoretical)
 
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