The dead cores of two stars collided in a galaxy some 130 million years ago. The collision was so extreme that it caused significant effects on gravitational waves. At that time, gravitational waves and light from stellar explosions traveled together across the universe.
They reached Earth simultaneously at 6:41 a.m. Eastern on August 17. This event has been titled as the dawn of “multimessenger astronomy”. Astronomers had been waiting for this moment for generations. We all know that light obeys a speed limit.
This speed limit is about one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Nothing can always travel fast. But interestingly, gravity can travel at the same speed. Newton thought that time always moves forward at a uniform speed.
Einstein later showed that time is relative. Any information has a limited speed. Now be it photons carrying light or gravity.
Physicist Julian Creighton of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says that in relativity, the speed of information matters. That means the maximum speed at which you can send data from one place to another.
It is true that the speed of gravitational waves is equal to the speed of electromagnetic waves because they can both travel at the speed of information. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee physicist Julian Creighton is an expert in general relativity and a member of the LIGO team that first observed gravitational waves.