Affect of gravity instant or not?

  • Context: Undergrad 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Simulacrum
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Gravity
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
3 replies · 4K views
Simulacrum
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
I read an interesting article a couple of years ago, unfortunately I don't remember where. It had to do with the affect of Gravity on planets. We already know the speed of Light and that it takes so many minutes or hours for the light of a planet to reach us. I'd like to know if Gravity's affect is instantaneous or does it have a "speed" of some sort.
Here's a hypothetical situation: we've invented Teleportation of mass, we even built a machine big enough to teleport a moon. If you teleport something of that mass and it arrives instantaneously, does it's gravitational affect on nearby objects take a finite amount of time to happen or is it also instant?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Not.

Under current observations, it would seem that the gravitational field propagates information at the speed of light. So if the Sun were to instantly disappear, it would take ~8mins for us to know.
 
OK, thanks for the replay!