Gravitational Waves Pass Straight Through You

Right now, faint ripples in space could be passing straight through your body, and nothing can stop them.

Gravitational waves are not blocked by anything. Light can be stopped by a wall or a planet, but these ripples pass through solid matter, through Earth, through you, almost untouched.

When a gravitational wave reaches you, it slightly stretches you one way and squeezes you the other, then reverses. The whole Earth does the same, subtly changing shape as the wave rolls past. The catch is how tiny the effect is. A powerful wave from a distant black hole collision changes your height by far less than the width of a single atom. You feel nothing. But it is really happening, all the time, from crashes across the cosmos.

Because they pass through everything, gravitational waves carry a clean, unblocked message from the most extreme places in the universe. They travel from the hearts of colliding black holes straight to us, carrying secrets light could never deliver.

Follow The Cosmic Vault — the universe is stranger than you think.