Michele's wiki/blog

Authors: Pranesh A. Sundararajan

Date: 31 Mar 2008

Abstract: The inspiral of a stellar mass compact object falling into a massive Kerr black hole can be broken into three different regimes: An adiabatic inspiral phase, where the inspiral timescale is much smaller than the orbital period; a late-time radial infall, which can be approximated as a plunging geodesic; and a regime where the body transitions from the inspiral to plunge. In earlier work, Ori and Thorne have outlined a method to compute the trajectory during this transition for a compact object in a circular, equatorial orbit. We generalize this technique to include inclination and eccentricity.

abs pdf