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 sys tem. There am evidence and compelling reasons to believe that the quad rupole formula is valid even in a fairly strong gravitational field, a lthough its fully consistent analytical derivation is not yet known. I n particular, we emphasize that the application of the quadrupole form ula to the binary pulsar system PSR 191.3+16 as well as other binary p ulsars, which are weakly bound by gravity, is well justified.