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2 years ago in Astrophysics , Physics By Stephen

Can anyone recommend papers discussing the mass defect in General Relativity?

I understand the Newtonian binding energy concept, but its treatment in GR especially for distributed systems like galaxies or binaries is subtler. My advisor mentioned the Komar and ADM mass integrals, but the derivations are dense. I need pedagogical papers or reviews that clearly connect gravitational binding to the measured mass defect in strongly relativistic regimes.

 

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By Rani Answered 2 years ago

I've guided students through this conceptual hurdle. Start with the classic review by Poisson, "A Relativist's Toolkit," Chapter 4, which brilliantly dissects the ADM mass. For the specific connection to binding energy, I'd recommend the seminal paper by Arnowitt, Deser, and Misney (1962) on the energy of isolated systems. More accessibly, look at Baumgarte & Shapiro's "Numerical Relativity," which has a section on mass and angular momentum diagnostics. The key is to internalize that in GR, the mass is a global property of the entire spacetime, measured at infinity, and includes all binding contributions negatively

 

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