Coalescing binary black holes experience an impulsive kick from anisotropic emission of gravitational waves. Recoil velocities are sufficient to eject most coalescing black holes from dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, which may explain the apparent absence of massive black holes in these systems. Ejection from giant elliptical galaxies would be rare, but coalescing black holes are displaced...

The nature of superluminal photon propagation in the gravitational field describing radiation from a time-dependent, isolated source (the Bondi-Sachs metric) is considered in an effective theory which includes interactions which violate the strong equivalence principle. Such interactions are, for example, generated by vacuum polarisation in conventional QED in curved spacetime. The relation of ...

The long term perturbation of a Newtonian binary system by an incident gravitational wave is discussed in connection with the issue of gravitational ionization. The periodic orbits of the planar tidal equation are investigated and the conditions for their existence are presented. The possibility of ionization of a Keplerian orbit via gravitational radiation is discussed.

Gravitational waves in the linear approximation propagate in the Schwarzschild spacetime similarly as electromagnetic waves. A fraction of the radiation scatters off the curvature of the geometry. The energy of the backscattered part of an initially outgoing pulse of the quadrupole gravitational radiation is estimated by compact formulas depending on the initial energy, the Schwarzschild radius...

The formalism for computing the gravitational power radiation from excitations on cosmic strings forming a junction is presented and applied to the simple case of co-planar strings at a junction when the excitations are generated along one string leg. The effects of polarization of the excitations and of the back-reaction of the gravitational radiation on the small scale structure of the string...

It is proved that the field of a gravitational lens induces no rotation in the polarization vector of electromagnetic radiation, in agreement with the previous literature, but with a different approach. The result is generalized to the case of less conventional gravitational lenses (static cosmic strings and gravitational waves). To appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics

We investigate the effect of an infinite cosmic string on a cosmological background. We find that the metric is approximately a scaled version of the empty space string metric, i.e. conical in nature. We use our results to place bounds on the amount of cylindrical gravitational radiation currently emitted by such a string. We then analyse explicitly the gravitational radiation equations and sho...

We study primordial gravitational waves produced during inflation in quantum gravity at a Lifshitz point proposed by Horava. Assuming power-counting renormalizability, foliation-preserving diffeomorphism invariance, and the condition of detailed balance, we show that primordial gravitational waves are circularly polarized due to parity violation. The chirality of primordial gravitational waves ...

We study the Hawking radiation from Rotating black holes from gravitational anomalies point of view. First, we show that the scalar field theory near the Kerr black hole horizon can be reduced to the 2-dimensional effective theory. Then, following Robinson and Wilczek, we derive the Hawking flux by requiring the cancellation of gravitational anomalies. We also apply this method to Hawking radia...

This paper shows that the backscattering of electromagnetic and gravitational waves can be dominant when the radiation is produced very close to a spherical black hole. Numerical investigation shows that almost 50 percent of the outgoing quadrupole gravitational wave is backscattered, for a class of initial data. A similar analysis reveals at least 20 percent effect for a dipole electromagnetic...