# Prove that colliding celestial bodies produce perturbations in the fabric of space-time

So I was recently asked this question by one of my professors, it really is confusing for me at the moment since I only have a basic grasp of and the ideas Einstein proposed.

P.S: I was wondering if this connects to gravitational waves?

• Yes, such collisions produce gravitational waves. What course were you taking when your professor asked you to prove this? Jul 10, 2019 at 2:19
• It wasn't a course, I bumped into him and asked for a challenging problem and he gave me this. Jul 10, 2019 at 2:23
• Well, to understand this you would need to learn about the following: tensors; the metric tensor; the curvature tensor; the energy-momentum tensor; Einstein’s field equations; how to linearize them to study small metric perturbations; using the linearization to derive something called the quadrupole formula for gravitational radiation. Jul 10, 2019 at 2:28
• You could try digging into Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. Do you already understand Special Relativity and Minkowski spacetime? Jul 10, 2019 at 2:30
• By the way, the celestial bodies don’t have to collide. They can just orbit each other and produce gravitational waves. Jul 10, 2019 at 2:37