Could gravitational waves be an alternative to dark matter or dark energy?

[naita]

@Quartz

I’ve just read this article by former Doper the Bad Astronomer about four new detections of gravitational waves. It seems to me that, as with exoplanets, we’re soon going to find that they’re very common. Indeed, thinking further, isn’t it the case that any two co-orbiting objects generate gravitational waves? Even the Earth orbiting the Sun? Or a star orbiting the galaxy’s central black hole? Just at minuscule levels we cannot detect. The question then becomes, “Do all those gravitational waves add up to something significant?” Or is it already accounted for in the masses of the objects?

Gravitational wave energy isn’t new energy, it’s just a form of energy loss that is so minuscule it’s been very difficult to measure until now. And the events we do measure are only the ones that are on an … astronomical scale. “We” already assumed they were emitted by any moving mass, so it’s not like physicists suddenly have to include or disregard them.

When a system sends out gravitational waves that loss of energy leads to the system losing mass. Only the most violent of movements, like the pirouette of two merging black holes, leads to a significant loss, so there should be a lot less gravity wave energy around in the universe than there is mass.