On Gravitational Radiation from Binary Systems

We discuss gravitational radiation from a neutral mass particle within a bound orbit in the background Schwarzschild metric. We compare the power loss of gravitational radiation according to this formalism with the heuristic quadrupole radiation formula as applied to a binary system. There are evidence and compelling reasons to believe that the quadrupole formula is valid even in a fairly strong gravitational field, although its fully consistent analytical derivation is not yet known. In particular, we emphasize that the application of the quadrupole formula to the binary pulsar system PSR 1913+16 as well as other binary pulsars, which are weakly bound by gravity, is well justified.