These gifs came from a conversation with my sibling Ansel, who works with the LIGO collaboration and also teaches undergraduate physics. They were dissatisfied with the diagrams that were generally available when teaching students about spinning neutron stars that generate gravitational waves. The existing diagram they had been using illustrated several pieces of important information:
- A neutron star is spherical and spins around its axis
- It can be “squished” along its rotational axis, but that distortion is symmetrical around the spin axis, so it doesn’t create gravitational waves.
- If the star has a bump or some other distortion (sometimes called a mountain) which is NOT symmetrical around the spin axis, that causes gravitational waves to be generated as the star spins.
But the diagram also had some shortcomings:
- It didn’t clearly portray the way that the waves move out from their source
- It didn’t give a good sense of the “mountain” being an asymmetrical piece of the star
- It was a still image, where including movement would have provided much more info to the viewer.
It also didn’t portray some potentially helpful information that was shown in other diagrams, like the star’s magnetic field and the beams of light that they emit from their poles, which also don’t necessarily align with the spin axis.
So I took this as challenge for my animation skills.
Modular Animations
My goals here were:
- To use color to differentiate and highlight important elements of the diagram. There is a lot of information at play here, and I didn’t want it to become too visually cluttered to be clear
- To use animation to visually describe a moving system in a way that a still image couldn’t
- To create variations of the gif that showed different combinations of the same elements, so that Ansel (or any other instructors who wanted to use the images) could choose which one was most useful for what they were teaching.
Alternates
Once I had the initial layout, I also created some alternate versions of the gifs with different mountain placement, just to show another possible configuration.
