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Post-Newtonian Theory and its Application

Luc Blanchet
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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.

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Luc Blanchet. 2003-04-02. Post-Newtonian Theory and its Application. https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304014

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