haruspex said:
Yes. Gravity is mediated by gravitons, but they also travel at light speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
In classical general relativity, gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light, but gravitons, a hypothetical quantum gravity concept, are not involved.
Observationally, the best evidence of "
the speed of gravity" involves the infall, collision, and merger of compact massive objects like neutron stars.
In these events, gravitational waves are detected at essentially the same time as light from that event is detected, even when these events are many light years distant. Any discrepancy in the arrival times can fairly be attributed to the sequence of events in the original event. From the link above:
The detection of
GW170817 in 2017, the finale of a neutron star inspiral observed through both gravitational waves and gamma rays, at a distance of 130 million light years, currently provides by far the best limit on the difference between the speed of light and that of gravity. Photons were detected 1.7 seconds after peak gravitational wave emission; assuming a delay of zero to 10 seconds, the difference between the speeds of gravitational and electromagnetic waves, vGW − vEM, is constrained to between −3×10
−15 and +7×10
−16 times the speed of light.
The speed of light is, of course, exactly and by definition, 299,792,458 meters per second. The discrepancy between the speed of gravitational waves and the speed of light is at most about -1 to + 0.2 micrometers per second from the speed of light.
A brief detour regarding quantum gravity
Quantum gravity is a hypothesis that is very plausible and probably the single most widely expected to exist deviation from "core theory" out there, but there is no experimental or observational confirmation of it. The mathematics involved in quantum gravity have also proven much more difficult to work out in a rigorous, consistent manner that is a match to all observations than one would naively expect.
If massless gravitons did exist, however, they, like all massless particles, would travel at the speed of light, which is really, due to special relativity, the speed of all massless particles.
There are qualitative reasons that gravitons should be massless, but there are also theories about hypothetical massive gravitons. If the graviton were massive, its mass would be constrained to be less than 1.76 x 10
-23 eV/c
2 according to the
Particle Data Group based upon the GW170817 event in 2017 and special relativity.