Post-Newtonian Theory and its Application
Abstract
Description
We review some recent works on the post-Newtonian theory of slowly-moving (post-Newtonian) sources, and its application to the problems of dynamics and gravitational radiation from compact binary systems. Our current knowledge is 3PN on the center-of-mass energy and 3.5PN on the gravitational-wave flux of inspiralling compact binaries. We compute the innermost circular orbit (ICO) of binary black-hole systems and find a very good agreement with the result of numerical relativity. We argue that the gravitational dynamics of two bodies of comparable masses in general relativity does not resemble that of a test particle on a Schwarzschild background. This leads us to question the validity of some ``Schwarzschild-like'' templates for binary inspiral which are constructed from post-Newtonian resummation techniques.
16 pages, to appear in the Proc. of the 12th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, M. Shibata (ed.)
16 pages, to appear in the Proc. of the 12th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, M. Shibata (ed.)