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Asked by Arianna to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 14 Nov 2017.
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Ry Cutter answered on 14 Nov 2017:
No one knows!
This is one of the key parts to making a quantum theory of gravity. Another way to ask it is, what is the smallest possible amount of gravity!? If we can find this out there will be so much physics we can do!
Great question,
Ryan 🙂
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Scott Melville answered on 14 Nov 2017:
This is a great question! The answer is: it depends on what the gravitons are hitting. Objects with more mass ‘absorb’ more gravitons, so feel a stronger gravitational force of attraction. Makes sense, right?
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We can say something interesting about the MOST force a single graviton could possible carry, before it just collapses into a black hole. A single particle of gravity would naturally be about one ‘Planck length’ in size (this is the size at which our non-particle theories of gravity break down), so if you translate that into a force, it’s absolutely huge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_force
But then the the question is, what does this MEAN? It’s saying that if you push something 10^44 Newtons hard, then crazy black hole things are going to happen 😛 (we still don’t quite understand this ourselves – gravity is weird!) -
Daniel Williams answered on 15 Nov 2017:
It depends on the wavelength of the graviton, in the same way that the amount of energy that a photon carries depends on its wavelength. It’s not completely clear what gravitons actually are though, because they don’t seem to have the same relationship with gravitational waves that photons and electromagnetic waves have. We’ve observed gravitational waves, but not gravitons, and I think it’s pretty unlikely that we will observe gravitons any time soon, because they don’t interact much with matter.
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Hannah Middleton answered on 17 Nov 2017:
We don’t know yet! I think it would also depend on whether or not the graviton has any mass.
Comments
Arianna commented on :
thanks