Gravity seminar - Vojtech Witzany Seminar

Abstract: When a material body or a black hole are moving in a curved
background, they are not moving on a geodesic of the said background.
There is, however, a limit, where the corrections to geodesic motion
are small. This limit has to do with the spatial and temporal scales
of the background being much larger than those of the body and its
proper gravitational field. I will talk about the general problem of
finite size effects in the motion in this limit, specifically that of
the spin and the quadrupole. Finally, I will specialize the discussion
to the astrophysical case of inspirals of stellar mass objects of
various kinds into supermassive black holes.