Speaker
Maarten van de Meent
Description
The dissipation of energy and angular momentum through the emission of gravitational waves dampens the eccentricity of compact binaries. This is a well-known fact in gravitational wave theory. However, there is a notable well-documented exception to this rule: in extreme mass-ratio inspirals the eccentricity will initially decrease during the inspiral, but will ``tick-up'' just before the binary transitions to its final plunge. We here give a simple explanation for this behaviour, showing that this the expected universal behaviour for eccentric systems transitioning through a last stable orbit.