My role: shader design and implementation
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.
The waves distort spacetime, and all the objects in it, in different ways along different axes. As the waves ripple out and pass through an object, the distortions change cyclically.
So this shader separates the object’s X, Y and Z axes. In Blender’s case, this means encoding them as the red, green, and blue channels in a color. It then modifies each of them using a sine function and recombines them back into a color that can be used to set the vector displacement value, which controls how the vertices of the object will appear to move. I created accessible variable inputs to control the amplitude, speed, and frequency of the changes.
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. Actual gravitational wave distortions would be far too small for us to see.
I made the sphere gifs just to provide a variety of visualizations of how the distortions would look. This grid provides a little more of a visual breakdown.
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 depending on the direction the wave is coming from.
