"What happens if you are whacked with a gravity wave?" Topic

What with all the goings on with that "recent" neutron star merger/collision, I was wondering just how close is dangerous?
Do they propagate planar? (Is that the right word?) if so, would the strength fall off inverse square? Or would it be inverse cube?
How close is dangerous to, say, life on Earth?
Or would the other radiation crisp us first?

What would be the effect of getting walloped by a strong gravity wave?
Would colliding/merging black holes have more deadly gravity waves?

Do they disrupt matter or just make us go "wubba wubba"?

And can we surf gravity waves? Catch a big one to the stars? :)

Stop giving out all the negative waves, man!

How to deal with waves.
YouTube link

The subject will be covered on NPR's Science Friday today,if anyone's interested.

Lucky for us here on Earth, while the origins of gravitational waves can be extremely violent, by the time the waves reach the Earth they are millions of times smaller and less disruptive. In fact, by the time gravitational waves from the first detection reached LIGO, the amount of space-time wobbling they generated was thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom! Such inconceivably small measurements are what LIGO was designed to make.

link

And here's the SciFri interview with two LIGO astrophysicists:

link

(Scroll down to it).

So, we won't even go "wubba wubba"?
Damn.
But how close would a person have to be to feel effects? And would the radiation from the "event" fry us first?

Here's another question.
I saw a "timeline" on line, showowhen the various forms of radiation, and the gravity waves, arrived on Earth.
Assuming they all generate "at the speed of light", why a timeline?
Or did the events that generate this radiation have the differing timelines?

Using your nomenclature, " This is above my pay scale."

But, from the diagram from Hafen's link, it seems that the gravity waves "ripple" out from every direction. The picture shows a single plane of a grid to illustrate the distortions of space.

Seconds after that, focused beams of gamma radiation are given off. No idea how the LIGO scientists can determine that.

You're right, what is the timeline for this event? Do the gravity waves begin before contact of the neutron star/ black hole collisions, and then hit a maximum during the collision, only to slowly die away again once the neutron stars/black holes coalesce?

Does the gamma ray radiation occur as a single pulse or is it continuous during the collision? Does the radiation change intensity during the collision? I assume the neutron star/black holes are still spinning around each other during this whole event. So, one can assume, the gamma ray burst also spin? Would this look like a pair of pulsars? Remember, pulsars are also neutron stars.

link

As far as going "wubba-wubba", I can state that all radiation is subject to the inverse square law. So the amount and type of radiation produced and the proximity to the source are the main factors.

Gamma radiation is very dangerous. I expect two black holes crashing together will release the most gamma radiation possible (more mass than crashing neutron stars). If you are in line of the gamma burst and close enough, you will fry.

The gravity waves will most likely be lethal too. The distortions of space within your body will have dire consequences on organs, cells and molecules. I would suspect that your body would dis-integrate on the molecular level……if you were close enough.

The space/time perturbations from the neutron star collision at 130 lya was far less than that of the diameter of a nucleus by the time they reached us (see link above). What happens if this perturbation was about 100 times the size of a typical atom? What would happen to a DNA molecule or the cell wall of a neuron?

Sometimes it's good that space is very, very, very big! Lots of nasty stuff out there.