What is a graviton?
What is a graviton? Where can it be found?
According to Weisstein's world of Physics, a graviton is "a theoretical particle having no mass and no charge that carries the gravitational force."
In quantum mechanics, we know that light comes to us in massless packets, or particles, called photons, which carries electromagnetic force with it. Because this worked so well and is essential to the theory of quantum mechanics, people hypothesized the existence of a similar particle which carries the gravitational force.
As of today (June 4, 2003) we have not found proof that the graviton exists. Because these particles carry very little energy, they are very hard to detect - but we're still looking!
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Related questions:
- How do gravitons escape black holes to tell the universe about their gravity?
- What is the speed of gravity?
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