for a second there i thought the question i posed had a "right" and "wrong" answer. what i understood originally was that gravity (in its most fundmental form) is in the form of 'gravitons,' much like matter consists of neutrons, protons, and electrons. these gravitons, much like photons, travel as a wave (they are both a wave and a particle!) which are subjected to the laws of space-time (time is the 4th dimension...) if you stretched the gravitational wave out, the most it could stretch out was time ... it would be the same as time.

however, some punk at umaryland (van flandern) claims that gravitational waves are 300,000,000 times faster than the speed of light. he based this on a lot of experimentations ... and there is evidence from

but someone else then said that what van flandern failed to keep in mind the GM abberations (apparently in the 60/'70s some astronomers thought that light escaping supernovas were faster than the speed of light but they didn't keep in mind GM aberrations which then proved that the faster than the speed of light was simply an illusion).

if any of you are going to mention the recent princeton experiment where some scientists pumped light through a caesium gas medium and had light arrive at the end before it hit the cell... it turns out that there is a good explanation for it ... it didn't actually travel faster than the speed of light ... basically there were pulses of light; and the pulse of light that people thought was from te same beam was actually from the beam before ... but this is a most basic explanation for it; i don't really feel like explaining it, but you can read about it here.

so i *think* the answer is we would know 8 minutes afterwards. i believe that there has been scientific evidence proving that gravity is still a part of the space-time continuum and that no information can travel faster than the speed of light.

god my head hurts