Table of Contents
How does gravity affect the speed of light?
Answer: The short answer is no, the speed of light is unchanged by gravity. If for example light travels from a distant star to Earth and passes by a black hole, the path of the light will get bent as it passes by the black hole, which will lengthen its travel time. The actual speed of light, though, is unchanged.
How do gravitational waves propagate?
Gravitational Waves are, in their most basic sense, ripples in spacetime. If a star explodes as a supernova, gravitational waves carry energy away from the detonation at the speed of light. If two black holes collide, they will cause these ripples in spacetime to propagate like ripples across the surface of a pond.
How do gravity waves propagate?
Is the speed of light the same as the speed of gravity?
Although the constants of electromagnetism never appear in the equations for Einstein’s General Relativity, the speed of gravity undoubtedly equals the speed of light.
How does gravity affect light if it has no mass?
It might be surprising to you to hear that gravity can affect light even though light has no mass. If gravity obeyed Newton’s law of universal gravitation, then gravity would indeed have no effect on light. The gravitational curvature of light’s path is a weak enough effect that we don’t notice it much on earth.
How fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 kilometers per second
Surprisingly, the answer has nothing to do with the actual speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second) through the “vacuum” of empty space.
How fast is the speed of gravity?
299,792,458 metres per second
Just as the speed of a massless particle of light in a vacuum is restricted by the Universe’s upper speed limit, the massless distortions of spacetime would also be energy zipping along at top speed. Or, to be more precise, gravity moves at 299,792,458 metres per second, a rate we can just call c.