Well, Achernar, I’m not an expert in general relativity, and since I don’t know your credentials with respect to GR, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with Chronos’ earlier post.
Here’s what another Ph.D. physicist (Matti Meron) says:
When adding energy to capacitors, the capacitor as a whole would seem slightly heavier after you pulled its charged plates further apart, yet the extra energy would be stored NOT within the metal, but instead in the e-field between the plates.
Wouldn’t something similar be true of rocks? The energy would end up as distortions of the gravity field and NOT as changes to the nuclei (or protons, or quarks) inside the rock? If I’m wrong, then what laws of physics describe how energy is stored inside of atoms when they are pulled farther away from the Earth?
Maybe it would help our concepts if the masses were larger. Imagine two thin parallel plates of neutronium with a small gap between them. Now pull them farther apart. This injects a huge amount of energy into the system. Is this extra energy stored somehow within those neutrons (possibly within the quarks inside?) How is an “energized” neutron different from any other? Why can’t gravitational potential energy simply be stored in surrounding space as a change in the gravity field pattern of the system?
Well stated like that, I suppose I agree, I was just thinking of the rock as the source of the gravitational waves.
You could look at gravitons as the place where the energy is stored.