A GW 'thought experiment' for Sally

Hey Sally. It's neat to chat with a gal who's interested in astrophysics
and gravity waves in particular. Check out this page on the Alcubierre
warp drive- www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

As a 'thought experiment', you're stationed on a distant asteroid for
doing gravity-wave research. Far away from any terrestrial seismic/
tectonic noise, your GW antennae (actually highly specialized acoustic
microphones) are free to detect any passing GW radiation. (As a side
note, the LIGO interferometers are actually such 'microphones'.)
Meanwhile, a newly-commisioned starship, the
Vlanderskree, with an Alcubierre Drive, is undergoing space trials.
Theory has it that as the ship is running in hyperdrive, it will trail a
cone-shaped GW 'wake' thru normal space exactly analogous to the
sonic-boom wake trailed by a supersonic jet in the atmosphere. Since the
ship and its warp-node 'cocoon' are traveling in hyperspace, they are de
facto superluminal in 'our' space, undetectable except by the GW
signature.
So you're equipment's all set up, ready to detect the wake
of the unseen ship. Right on cue comes the shuddering,
compression-rarefaction BOOM of the Vlanderskree's superluminal passage.
Simultaneously, the starfield flickers blue-red from the
compression-expansion wave, then returns to normal.

Of course this 'thought experiment' presumes that in such a future
setting, it'll be fully understood that space is not a 'void' but a
fluidic medium amenable to compression and expansion (and gravity itself
will be understood as the pressure-driven flow of this medium)

Whaddya think?

oc