Narrator says 'Gravity waves' did this ?????

[lordvader88]

Years ago I read a lot of books on modern physics, for the non-scientist public.

Today I watched this and this does not seem right or 'jive' with what I know of gravity waves at all.

What she say's starting at 2:11



The density of particles in the atmosphere, with or with out a lightning storm, causing variations in the gravitational field, enough to make a big pretty wave of gas in the sky 'attributed' to gravity waves ?

No way, or what has changed and people learned ?


Or maybe I mis-unterstood/never payed attention....Is she saying that this pattern of gravity waves is coming from the far away, and it's just the lightning storm lighting up the gas making the waves visible ?

The scale of it still seems way off to me. Places like LIGO are looking for 10^-21m  types of deflections. And this gas in the sky pattern must be kilometer's across, that's 10^+3.

[lordvader88]

she does say 'gravity waves are generated by these storms'

But they can't really mean that in the practical sense, me, my computer, my food, make gravity waves too

[radar_macgyver]

It means something else for fluid dynamics folks and atmospheric scientists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave

[Zero999]

I think the origional poster is confusing gravity waves with gravitational waves, which is something totally different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave

[GlennSprigg]

Interestingly, it is still yet to be detected.....
You can NOT measure it by any 'external' device. (It's at an internal sub-atomic level).
I love 'analogies'.... so the best I can find/say is this......
"Imagine" that 'Gravity' is like the real time 'Potential-Energy' of the "Big-Bang" !!!
(and only exists thus...)

[TerraHertz]

I think the origional poster is confusing gravity waves with gravitational waves, which is something totally different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave

I think the person scripting the video, has little understanding of what they are talking about. And I'm very skeptical that anyone seriously studying red sprites could think they are 'mysterious'.

Neither gravity or gravitational waves are involved.
The sprites are very obviously a charge transfer occurring when the upper area of thunderstorm clouds suddenly changes potential (due to a lightning stroke) thus changing the field distribution between the area close above the cloud, and the conductive ionized plasma of space and the limits of upper atmosphere. As the charges travel through the varying pressure regimes of the high atmosphere, the glow and ion channeling effects (filaments) vary, hence the vertically variegated structure of the sprites. All about differing glow discharge characteristics as the mean free path of electrons and gas ions varies with pressure.

At least one of those images of sprites (the one rotated in 3D) was obviously a computer generated model. Suggesting the physics of these plasma current flows are well understood - enough to simulate sprites fairly accurately.

[radar_macgyver]

They didn't say that gravity waves caused the sprites, they were talking about ripples in the pale green earth glow layer caused by gravity waves initiated by the same storm whose lightning produced the sprites.