• Question: What do gravitons look like and how large are they?

    Asked by Arianna to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 14 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      We don’t know!
      Gravitons are theoretical particles, we use them to describe them as the force carrier for gravity. The problem is, they need a lot of whacky physics to exists and we have no experimental way of finding them!
      Some people think they need 12 dimensions to exist!
      If you were to imagine a graviton though; it would look like a fat, grey (or black) photon!
      Hope that helps,
      Ryan 🙂

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      No one has seen a graviton before and we aren’t even sure they exist but if they do then they must have no mass (because gravity travels at the speed of light) so maybe they look like light (photons)

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Gravitons are like little ‘lumps’ of gravity, and they are as real as gravitational waves are 😉 (well, that is to say, we know that a large number of gravitons are real – but we’ve never seen just one or two, so maybe they don’t exist in small numbers for some reason).
      They are strongly self-interacting – that means that they like to clump up together and move around in a group. So if you could ‘see’ gravitons, they’d probably look like little balls of fluff (a bit like glueballs, actually, which are like the ‘particle’ for the strong nuclear force,
      https://phys.org/news/2015-10-particle-purely-nuclear.html
      )
      Hehe, sorry Ryan – but I guess I’m one of the whacky physicists 😉
      (And it’s string theory that needs 11 or 12 dimensions to exists, gravitons are just fine in any number of dimensions 🙂 )

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      Gravitons are like the equivalent of photons but for gravity. Photons carry around little “packets” of light and gravitons should carry little “packets” of gravity.

      It’s not known for sure, but it’s expected that the graviton should be massless. Using gravitational wave observations, we know that if they do exist, then they are either massless or the mass is extremely extremely small.

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