Re: Gravitational waves in strong field limit.

LEJ Brouwer <intuitionist1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Apologies in advance if this is a "newbie" question, but in the
> presence of strong gravitational fields, will gravitational waves start
> interacting with each other, to the extent that gravitational collapse
> may take place?

In principle, this can happen. There are, for example, exact solutions
to the field equations desribing colliding gravitational plane waves
forming a black hole (see, for instance, Hoenselaers and Ernst, J. Math.
Phys. 31 (1990) 144). An imploding axisymmetric gravitational wave
can also form a black hole (see, for instance, Abrahams and Evans, Phys.
Rev. D46 (1992) R4117), and similar behavior is known from numerical
solutions of the field equations for the nonaxisymmetric case (see, for
instance, Alcubierre et al., Phys. Rev. D61 (2000) 041501).

More generally, high-frequency gravitational waves in an otherwise slowly
varying "background" act effectively as a source of energy, and if enough
energy of this sortt is concentrated in a small region, it should collapse
in the same way any other source of gravity would. See, for example,
chap. 35.13-15 of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

Steve Carlip




.

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