How to Use gravitational wave in a Sentence

gravitational wave

noun
  • Here’s what does, and doesn’t, apply to gravitational waves as far as redshifts go.
    — Big Think, 3 Apr. 2026
  • That's around the same location as the source of the gravitational waves.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 19 Dec. 2025
  • Then, wait until a gravitational wave from deep space passes by.
    — Charlie Wood, Quanta Magazine, 30 Oct. 2024
  • As soon as these two stars collided, the gravitational wave signal came to an abrupt end.
    — Big Think, 13 Nov. 2025
  • At the time, there was still some debate about whether gravitational waves even existed.
    — Swapna Krishna, WIRED, 1 Dec. 2023
  • 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
  • The gravitational wave event only lasted about one-tenth of a second.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 2 Sep. 2020
  • And a shudder — a gravitational wave — rippled across the fabric of space-time.
    — Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2017
  • This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves.
    — Sophia Chen, Ars Technica, 13 Feb. 2023
  • When the neutron stars collide, a burst of gravitational waves is produced.
    — The Economist, 16 Oct. 2017
  • 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 burst of gravitational waves turned out to be a coincidence.
    — NBC News, 5 Feb. 2020
  • The frequency of the gravitational wave tells you the total mass of the system.
    — Steve Nadis, Wired, 23 May 2021
  • 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 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
  • Those are called gravitational waves.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 2 Mar. 2026
  • Tiny changes in the travel time of the lasers are indicators of a passing gravitational wave.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 3 Oct. 2017
  • 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
  • That's probably based on the properties of the gravitational wave chirp, at least.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Do the wave For starters, gravitational waves didn't emerge neatly from Einstein's work on them.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 30 June 2018
  • The cataclysmic clash released ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, as well as light from a gamma-ray burst.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN Money, 3 May 2025
  • 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
  • The key insight of the study is that gravitational waves don’t need to physically push atoms to be detected.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 21 Mar. 2026
  • The gravitational waves sent out by colliding black holes make a sound—or translate into a sound—something like a bell being rung.
    — Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2024
  • Instead, the emission of light comes after the emission of gravitational waves.
    — Big Think, 13 Nov. 2025
  • Furthermore, the gravitational waves suggested at least one of the two neutron stars was less massive than the sun.
    — Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 17 Dec. 2025
  • Those gravitational waves still exist today and gently slosh over Earth.
    — Paul Sutter, Space.com, 28 Aug. 2025
  • The two became one big black hole that rang out in far-reaching undulations of spacetime called gravitational waves.
    — Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 10 Sep. 2025
  • When a gravitational wave passes the spacecraft, the golden cubes’ positions change by up to a nanometer.
    — Tereza Pultarova, IEEE Spectrum, 16 July 2025

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.

Last Updated: