Post-Newtonian Theory and its Application
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0304014,
title = {Post-Newtonian Theory and its Application},
author = {Luc Blanchet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0304014},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
16 pages, to appear in the Proc. of the 12th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, M. Shibata (ed.)