- #1
shalayka
- 126
- 0
This is a question I recently posted on Lubos Motl's blog. I am hoping that maybe someone here will also have some insight into this...
------
I have been reading about gravitational waves in hopes that they will prepare me for my inevitable look into the gravitons that I asked you about in a previous comment section.
I've come to understand (from Cooperstock & Tieu's papers, take them or leave them) that the self-interaction between the stars of a galaxy occurs mostly due to gravitational effects. A "pressureless" fluid, so to speak, when ignoring the interiors of the stars.
My own extrapolation from this is that when an individual star is accelerated due to the gravitational pull of its neighbours, this causes the star to emit energy as a gravitational wave, which in turn causes a disturbance in any neighbours that lay upon the trajectory of this wave, which causes that [neighbouring] star to emit a gravitational wave, and on and so forth. It would seem to me then that since this collection of stars is not distributed isotropically, that this back-and-forth stimulation of gravitational waves would tend to occur more along the galactic plane (ex: xz axis) than in the up-down direction (ex: y axis).
Wouldn't it then be unreasonable to expect the stars to orbit around the galactic centre following standard Newtonian approximation, since that would require gravitational energy (including these gravitational waves) to be distributed isotropically?
I guess the closest analogy that I have in mind would be a laser, where the emission of photons is focused along a somewhat unified trajectory, rather than in all directions (more or less) equally.
I appreciate any information that you or your readers might have on this topic.
- Shawn
------
I have been reading about gravitational waves in hopes that they will prepare me for my inevitable look into the gravitons that I asked you about in a previous comment section.
I've come to understand (from Cooperstock & Tieu's papers, take them or leave them) that the self-interaction between the stars of a galaxy occurs mostly due to gravitational effects. A "pressureless" fluid, so to speak, when ignoring the interiors of the stars.
My own extrapolation from this is that when an individual star is accelerated due to the gravitational pull of its neighbours, this causes the star to emit energy as a gravitational wave, which in turn causes a disturbance in any neighbours that lay upon the trajectory of this wave, which causes that [neighbouring] star to emit a gravitational wave, and on and so forth. It would seem to me then that since this collection of stars is not distributed isotropically, that this back-and-forth stimulation of gravitational waves would tend to occur more along the galactic plane (ex: xz axis) than in the up-down direction (ex: y axis).
Wouldn't it then be unreasonable to expect the stars to orbit around the galactic centre following standard Newtonian approximation, since that would require gravitational energy (including these gravitational waves) to be distributed isotropically?
I guess the closest analogy that I have in mind would be a laser, where the emission of photons is focused along a somewhat unified trajectory, rather than in all directions (more or less) equally.
I appreciate any information that you or your readers might have on this topic.
- Shawn