Chronos’ post in this thread made me wonder, if a graviton is a particle, then that would imply that an object would continue to move in a straight line until a graviton warped space to turn it. That would mean that an object in motion in a sufficiently large orbit from a distant mass such that there was a measurable gap between graviton strikes, would not orbit in a smooth curve. Instead, it would turn in angles at infrequent intervals.
Is that understanding correct?
Any full and complete answer to your question as asked would require a theory of quantum gravity, which we don’t have. However, we do have a full and complete theory of quantum electromagnetism, which is qualitatively similar in many ways to gravity. So we can answer questions about how charged particles orbit each other.
And the answer there is that the individual photon “strikes” aren’t well-defined to begin with, and neither is any notion of the orbiting particle’s “path”. There are deviations from what we’d expect classically due to the quantized nature of the interaction, and we can measure those deviations with very sensitive experiments, and quantum electrodynamics passes all of those tests with flying colors, but the nature of those deviations are mostly pretty subtle.
Gravitation presumably also shows deviations from what we would classically expect, but without a theory of quantum gravity, we don’t know what those deviations would be, and whatever they would be, they’d be even more subtle and hard to detect than the ones for electromagnetism.