If you could instantly switch off the suns gravity how long

If you could instantly switch off the sun\'s gravity, how long would it take for the earth to revert to a galaxy centered orbit?

During the 8 miniutes that the zero gravity wave travels to earth does the effect of the sun\'s gravity gradually diminish or will it be instant on arrival?

Solution

So yes, gravity is this force that binds everything in the universe together. There\'s this quite fundamental principle in physics that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And so, physicists have rather suspected on the basis of that that gravity must propagate at a finite speed. At the speed of light, because if it happened instantaneously then wobbling something from side to side in the universe would essentially be propagating information about how that thing was moving faster than the speed of light and violating this very fundamental principle.

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