The secular orbital decay observed in relativistic binary pulsars, particularly the Hulse–Taylor system PSR B1913+16, is widely regarded as indirect evidence for gravitational wave emission predicted by General Relativity. While the radiative interpretation has achieved remarkable phenomenological success, it implicitly assumes a non-dissipative vacuum.In this work, the observed orbital period decay is reinterpreted within the MyominAung Photon-Sea Theory (MATE) as a dissipative interaction between compact objects and a structured vacuum medium. In the MATE framework, the vacuum is modeled as a photon-sea possessing effective density and viscosity. Orbital motion through this medium leads to gradual energy transfer into microscopic vacuum excitations, analogous to viscous damping in classical fluids.A hydrodynamic dissipation model is shown to reproduce the observed orbital decay rate of PSR B1913+16 with numerical accuracy indistinguishable from the quadrupole gravitational radiation formula. The equivalence demonstrates that orbital decay measurements alone do not uniquely discriminate between radiative spacetime dynamics and medium-based energy dissipation.This interpretation does not deny the empirical detection of correlated signals in gravitational wave observatories. Rather, it suggests that such signals may represent propagating medium perturbations rather than oscillations of spacetime geometry itself. The analysis supports the broader MATE program by providing a physically grounded, testable alternative interpretation of relativistic orbital energy loss.
Myomin Aung (Thu,) studied this question.
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