Gravity Waves, Chaos, and Spinning Compact Binaries

Spinning compact binaries are shown to be chaotic in the post-Newtonian expansion of the two-body system. Chaos by definition is the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and a consequent inability to predict the outcome of the evolution. As a result, the spinning pair will have unpredictable gravitational waveforms during coalescence. This poses a challenge to future gravity wave observatories which rely on a match between the data and a theoretical template.