Quadrupolar power radiation by a binary system in de Sitter background

Abstract

Cosmological observations over past couple of decades favor our universe with a tiny positive cosmological constant. Presence of cosmological constant not only imposes theoretical challenges in gravitational wave physics, it has also observational relevance. Inclusion of cosmological constant in linearized theory of gravitational waves modifies the power radiated quadrupole formula. There are two types of observations which can be impacted by the modified quadrupole formula. One is the orbital decay of an inspiraling binary and other is the modification of the waveform at the detector. Modeling a compact binary system in an elliptic orbit on de Sitter background, we obtain energy and angular momentum radiation due to emission of gravitational waves. We also investigate the evolution of orbital parameters under back reaction and its impact on orbital decay rate. In the limit to circular orbit, our result matches to that obtained in [B. Bonga and J. S. Hazboun, Phys. Rev. D 96 (2017) 064018, arXiv:1708.05621 ].