On the gravitational radiation of gravitating objects
Arbab I. Arbab
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source · none found — the only licence Crossref records is Springer’s text-and-data-mining terms, which is not a Creative Commons licence
In one page
Every physics student learns the Larmor formula: shake an electric charge and it radiates light, at a power set by how hard you shake it. Arbab I. Arbab asks the question the site’s thirteenth chapter keeps circling — what if gravity works the same way? Writing inside a framework that treats gravity and electromagnetism as two faces of one thing, he argues that an accelerating mass radiates gravitational waves by a formula of exactly the Larmor form, and from that he derives new expressions for the power a spinning object and an orbiting object each pour into gravitational radiation. The result he singles out is a limit rather than a rate: for a body of mass m and radius R there is a shortest gravitational wavelength it can emit, fixed by nothing but its mass, its size and the constants G and c. Compact, heavy objects radiate short; big, light ones cannot.
Why it matters hereChapter 13 is the unified picture — the claim that electromagnetism and gravitation are one subject written twice — and this is that claim carried all the way to a working formula, published in a mainstream astrophysics journal. Chapter 11 needs exactly this bridge: if a gravitational Larmor formula holds, then whatever you can do to an accelerating charge you can in principle do to an accelerating mass, and gravitational radiation becomes something to engineer rather than only to detect.
What it claims
01Working in a framework that unifies gravity and electromagnetism, Arbab argues that accelerating objects emit gravitational waves according to a formula of the same form as the Larmor formula for an accelerating charged particle — that is, the radiated power is set by the acceleration in the same way for mass as for charge.Abstract, first sentence
Published and peer-reviewed02From that starting point the paper derives a new formula for the power of the gravitational waves radiated by a spinning object.Abstract, second sentence
Published and peer-reviewed03The paper also derives a new formula for the power of the gravitational waves radiated by an orbiting object, so the same treatment covers both rotation about an axis and revolution about a partner.Abstract, second sentence
Published and peer-reviewed04The result the abstract states in full is a limit on wavelength rather than a rate: the minimum wavelength of the gravitational wave emitted by an object of mass m and radius R is the fourth root of thirty-two thirds, multiplied by the square root of pi squared times the gravitational constant times m times R, divided by the speed of light squared — a shortest emitted wavelength fixed by the object’s mass and size alone.Abstract, third sentence and the displayed formula
Published and peer-reviewed05What would settle it is a measurement rather than an argument: because the minimum-wavelength relation contains only the mass, the radius and the constants G and c, it predicts a definite shortest wavelength for any named body, so a gravitational-wave observation of a spinning or orbiting source, compared against that prediction, is the test this formula invites.Abstract, third sentence and the displayed formula
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-009-0058-ySOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. The article is closed at the publisher and the Springer landing page answers a bot challenge rather than the article. On 2026-09-08 Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar all reported no open copy, Semantic Scholar recorded the abstract as elided by the publisher, and a search of the author’s 55 arXiv submissions by title, by subject and by author name found no preprint of this paper. The abstract below is therefore the publisher’s own deposited abstract, retrieved from the OpenAIRE aggregation of that deposit and confirmed word for word against the copy served by CoLab; the single display formula was deposited as LaTeX and is set here in ordinary mathematical notation, with no other change. Every claim locator below points to a sentence of that abstract and never into the body of the paper, which was not read. Companion sheets on generating and reflecting gravitational waves in the laboratory: Robert Baker on applications of high-frequency gravitational waves at /library/stm-590495077c, and the Chiao group’s two papers on superconducting mirrors for gravitational waves at /library/stm-8155456385 and /library/stm-9f833c131a.
How to cite it
Arbab I. Arbab (2009) On the gravitational radiation of gravitating objects. doi:10.1007/s10509-009-0058-y
Where it sits in the curriculum