How to Use gravitational wave in a Sentence

gravitational wave

noun
Definition of gravitational wavenext
  • The science of hunting gravitational waves is old on paper and young in practice.
    — Author: Sarah Kaplan, Ben Guarino, Alaska Dispatch News, 28 Sep. 2017
  • In all four detections, the gravitational waves were produced by the merger of two black holes more massive than our sun.
    — Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 27 Sep. 2017
  • The entire notion of gravitational waves is mind-bending.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 3 Oct. 2017
  • The missing three suns' worth of mass became energy, expelled as gravitational waves.
    — Author: Sarah Kaplan, Ben Guarino, Alaska Dispatch News, 28 Sep. 2017
  • But detecting them directly has proved harder, for gravitational waves are ephemeral things.
    — The Economist, 3 Oct. 2017
  • Discovering the motion of space-time Scientists found evidence that the fabric of space and time gets warped by gravitational waves.
    — Harold Maass, The Week Us, theweek, 18 Apr. 2024
  • Pinpointing where these gravitational waves came from is a challenging task, notes Adrian Cho for Science.
    — Ben Panko, Smithsonian, 27 Sep. 2017
  • The 2017 Nobel physics prize has gone to three scientists whose work led to the first observation of the universe's gravitational waves two years ago.
    — David Meyer, Fortune, 3 Oct. 2017
  • The frequency of the gravitational wave tells you the total mass of the system.
    — Steve Nadis, Wired, 23 May 2021
  • To detect gravitational waves, LIGO tries to sense changes in length in its two 2.5-mile-long arms.
    — Sophia Chen, WIRED, 20 June 2019
  • In the case of a certain type of gravitational wave, the group found that unitary three-point functions are few and far between.
    — Quanta Magazine, 10 Nov. 2021
  • The era of gravitational wave astrophysics had dawned, but now it's come of age. . . .
    — Author: Sarah Kaplan, Ben Guarino, Alaska Dispatch News, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Do the wave For starters, gravitational waves didn't emerge neatly from Einstein's work on them.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 30 June 2018
  • And a shudder — a gravitational wave — rippled across the fabric of space-time.
    — Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2017
  • The first task in any gravitational wave detection is to try to extract a weak signal from that noise.
    — Steve Nadis, Wired, 23 May 2021
  • Lost in the collision was an enormous amount of energy in the form of a gravitational wave, a ripple in space that travels at the speed of light.
    — Seth Borenstein, Anchorage Daily News, 2 Sep. 2020
  • Tiny changes in the travel time of the lasers are indicators of a passing gravitational wave.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 3 Oct. 2017
  • The advent of gravitational wave detectors—there are now four of them—has recorded a steady flow of black hole mergers.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 17 Nov. 2022
  • The burst of gravitational waves turned out to be a coincidence.
    — NBC News, 5 Feb. 2020
  • When these pulsars ride the swell of a gravitational wave, though, the space-time ripple distorts this precision.
    — Briley Lewis, Popular Science, 29 June 2023
  • This is the fourth gravitational wave event documented by LIGO in the last two years, although the newest cosmic event is unique.
    — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, 16 Oct. 2017
  • That's probably based on the properties of the gravitational wave chirp, at least.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 17 Nov. 2022
  • When the neutron stars collide, a burst of gravitational waves is produced.
    — The Economist, 16 Oct. 2017
  • The gravitational wave event only lasted about one-tenth of a second.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 2 Sep. 2020
  • At the time, there was still some debate about whether gravitational waves even existed.
    — Swapna Krishna, WIRED, 1 Dec. 2023
  • The strongest gravitational waves come from the collision of black holes or very dense objects called neutron stars.
    — Mary Beth Griggs, The Verge, 3 Dec. 2018
  • This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves.
    — Sophia Chen, Ars Technica, 13 Feb. 2023
  • The survey data showed a flare, caused by an active supermassive black hole, traced back to the area where the gravitational wave event occurred.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 25 June 2020
  • In the past few years, gravitational waves have been detected for the first time: ripples in the fabric of space, coming from colliding black holes and neutron stars.
    — John Gribbin, WSJ, 11 May 2018
  • Usually, black holes like this are found with gravitational waves.
    — Elizabeth Gamillo, Discover Magazine, 18 Apr. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gravitational wave.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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