Abstract
Khan and Penrose obtained an exact solution for colliding plane impulsive gravitational waves with the remarkable feature that the spacetime before the collision is flat and after the collision is not only curved, but develops a future curvature singularity. The spacetime has been extensively investigated analytically by various authors using the Newman-Penrose equations. We feel that a separate insight is provided by using the method of Weber and Wheeler to calculate the momentum imparted to test particles by the colliding waves. In this paper we probe the curvature by considering the momentum imparted to test particles by the colliding gravitational waves so as to try to visualise the way the curvature increases in the chosen coordinates as the singularity is approached.
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