Thread: About spacetime warping and gravity

Hello. I would like to apologise if the next question seems not that professional or very well formulated as it comes from a non scientific (professional) person in this area. Since some time I am fascinated with the universe and the documentaries on it (Comos - A space time oddysey is just great). In all documentaries, when they arrive at Einstein's equations and we get to spacetime warping caused by the mass of an object which then causes the 'gravity pull', all the examples are with one single body, i.e. the Sun warping a lot the 'fabric' and Earth going around and around.

OK, this makes sense, what I did not see is Earth's own warp. How these two warped fields interact? For example, the Luna and Earth? We know that Luna has an effect on Earth with its gravitational pull and Earth on it, this is clear, however when I look up at the sky either through telescope or naked eye, I cannot grasp in my imagination and visualization effort to combine these two fields, when looking at examples everywhere this scenario is presented with some bending lines showing how Luna tuggs on Earth and creates the bulges, tides etc. But I don't think this is correct, don't you?

So, back to Einstein, ok, space itself is warped, this is quite nice to visualize with the Sun, very massive, however, I would like to have a visualization also for all the bodies in the Solar System. For example, it would be very interesting to have the relationship between: Sun <-> Earth <-> Luna <-> Jupiter

Sorry for this lengthy post!

Thank you very much.

Originally Posted by Essenar

So, back to Einstein, ok, space itself is warped, this is quite nice to visualize with the Sun, very massive, however, I would like to have a visualization also for all the bodies in the Solar System. For example, it would be very interesting to have the relationship between: Sun <-> Earth <-> Luna <-> Jupiter

I doubt that a good visualisation exists for this scenario. The issue here is that, while "curvature effects" of two bodies superimpose, they do so in a highly non-linear manner, unlike in the old Newtonian mechanics. I don't know of any suitable way to visualise this, while capturing all the dynamics of such a situation. Many-body problems in GR generally require the use of numerical methods, no closed analytic solutions exist for them, so there really isn't any straightforward way to generate an embedding diagram.