Like the neutron star gifs, this was a personal project based on a conversation with my sibling, who is a physicist. They pointed out that the usual representation of gravitational waves that appears in pop sci publications illustrates how gravitational waves move from their source, but doesn’t clearly show what gravitational waves actually are: distortions in spacetime.
Based on what they told me, I constructed a shader in Blender to visualize the 3-dimensional deformations that affect an object when a gravitational wave passes through it.
I made the sphere gifs just to provide a variety of visualizations of how the distortions of a gravitational wave effect spacetime and the objects in it. This grid provides a little more of a visual breakdown.
(These animations are made at arbitrary scales, and do not show the actual amplitude, speed, or frequency of the waves. The shader is only meant to provide a visual of the kind of distortion the waves create.)
The next set of gifs represents the LIGO Hanford gravitational wave observatory, which measures spacetime distortions in the length of two huge “beam tubes” in the desert of Washington state. The beam tubes are built at 90 degrees to each other so that researchers can pinpoint where gravitational waves are coming from based on the differences in how the tubes are distorted. These gifs aim to provide a simple visual on what those differences look like.
The Node Layout
