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Curious Kids: what are gravitational waves?

From the article

When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it squeezes or stretches the whole planet in the direction it travels. If we tried to measure it with something like a ruler, the ruler would appear to be the same length because the numbers on the ruler would also be stretched or squeezed, and wouldn’t change.

But scientists have a trick: they can use light, because light can only travel a certain distance over a certain time. If space is stretched out, the light has to travel a little bit farther, and takes longer. Vice versa for when space in squeezed.

The trick to knowing if space has been squeezed or stretched is to measure it in two directions, and calculate the difference. Unfortunately for us it isn’t something that is easy to measure.

The difference in the distance we’re looking for is 1,000 times smaller then a really tiny particle called a proton. To really blow your mind, our bodies have around 10 octillion protons (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).