If there was a source of a continuous gravitational wave at (say) 50hz, and amplitude of say a micrometer (a typical sound wave displacement, I think), and you were nearby (standing happily on a planet in an atmosphere), with your ear pointing to the source, would you hear it?
It seems to me that since the gravitational wave is reducing and increasing the distance between points in the atmosphere right at your eardrum, surely the density and pressure of the air there is likewise increasing and decreasing, so you might expect to hear it. What I can't "intuit" is whether you would actually hear it due to the fact that you yourself are also being distorted.
My tentative conclusion is that you would hear it. At any given time, there appears to be a pressure differential across your eardrum due to this distortion in space pressurising the materials – so … deflection?
(note: I know that in the recent LIGO announcement they talked about "hearing" the waves, but this is something completely different: an electro-acoustic rendition of the waveform. I'm asking about direct physical sensing.)
Best Answer
The frequency of the recent experiment was in the audible range. The amplitude was off by unspeakable orders of magnitude. But yes, you would hear it (even in vacuum, if you were to survive).
Yes, the GW are transverse (quadrupolar). But they do move things (they cause change in distances, that's actually how they detected them: the length of the 4km tube at LIGO changed; earlier experiments actually planned to detect the "sound" of a vibrating metal cylinder, but they weren't sensitive enough). An eardrum and the bones around them are a complex instrument and whatever direction the strain is applied, it would surely induce a vibrational motion that would produce vibration of the eardrum, even if not in the way you imagine (compare to sound, where there is direct pressure to the eardrum -- GW are more profound and make the eardrum itself directly deform and vibrate). If you were close enough to a cataclismic cosmic event, you would hear it across the emptiness of the space. Both directly (as induced vibrations in our bones), and through creaking of the structures around us.
It's interesting to note that generally the same instrument that was used more than a century ago to prove that velocity of the "aether" is impossible to detect (disproving the notion of an elastic medium permeating the universe) was now used to prove acceleration of the "aether" (so to speak) can and was measured.