Gravitational waves from merging compact binaries

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in modeling gravitational waves from merging compact binaries, highlighting numerical relativity, analytical methods, and their implications for gravitational-wave detection and astrophysics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the latest modeling techniques and their applications in understanding gravitational waves from binary mergers.

Findings

Numerical relativity enables precise modeling of black hole mergers.

Analytical methods like post-Newtonian expansions improve understanding of binary dynamics.

Gravitational-wave observations inform us about the properties of compact binary sources.

Abstract

Largely motivated by the development of highly sensitive gravitational-wave detectors, our understanding of merging compact binaries and the gravitational waves they generate has improved dramatically in recent years. Breakthroughs in numerical relativity now allow us to model the coalescence of two black holes with no approximations or simplifications. There has also been outstanding progress in our analytical understanding of binaries. We review these developments, examining merging binaries using black hole perturbation theory, post-Newtonian expansions, and direct numerical integration of the field equations. We summarize these approaches and what they have taught us about gravitational waves from compact binaries. We place these results in the context of gravitational-wave generating systems, analyzing the impact gravitational wave emission has on their sources, as well as what we can learn about them from direct gravitational-wave measurements.