If I understand that right, gravity also moves in space at the speed of light, therefore Earth will keep on orbiting for 8min around nothing?
It’s sort of how if you hold a slinky on one end hanging down, then drop the slinky, bottom will not start falling until the top reaches it. In a sense, bottom will be hanging onto nothing. But of course that nothing is tension from the top of the slinky.
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That is correct as weird as it sounds
The sun could be gone but its influence would remain. Kinda like getting out of a pool and looking back to see the waves on the surface that you caused.
Wouldn’t you see the effect on the moon?
Only if the moon is up.
Imagine seeing the moon just switch off
That would be a beautiful, terrifying sight. You could gaze up at the most amazing view of the stars as the whole world froze to death.
Yup
There’s a pretty cool short story where a guy is looking at the full moon and he realizes that it’s gotten way too bright, and that could only happen because the sun has just spontaneously exploded, and he basically just makes peace with the fact that the world is going to be destroyed very shortly.
Yeah - half a second before seeing it on the sun.
That is actually correct. The difference of being on the opposite side that faces the sun is just a few thousandths of a second, but it is there.
It goes to 9 minutes from 8, since every single communication gadget will yell out that the sun has disappeared as reports come in from the other side of the earth.
But we do have Twitter now.
Well they’re not entirely wrong… I mean I turn off my notifications when I go to sleep.
unless you’re sleeping - 8 minutes and maybe 30 seconds to start seeing posts online, 10 minutes to start getting news about it
I don’t know about you, but if I start seeing headlines about the Sun vanishing, I’m assuming it’s a hoax and going back to bed.
then wait until the 10min mark then! Would be rather odd if all news sources in unison decided to pull a prank like that
All we can see is 8 minutes into the sun’s past.
In about 8 minutes and 20 seconds, we would lose the Sun’s gravitational force. Namely, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second or 299,000 kilometers per second). This also means that we would be in complete darkness 8 minutes after the Sun disappears
https://curiousmatrix.com/what-would-happen-if-the-sun-disappeared/
What I wanna know is if gravitational waves travel at the speed of light all the time or are they influenced by media like light.
