When a white dwarf orbits an intermediate-mass black hole on an eccentric orbit, it experiences extreme tidal forces at each pericenter passage — the closest approach where the gravitational gradient across the star is strongest. The tidal bulge raised on the white dwarf dissipates energy through internal friction, circularizing the orbit and heating the star. This is the Newtonian picture: the tidal force is instantaneous, the bulge responds, and the dissipation is straightforward to calculate.
Tidal and Bonga (arXiv 2602.22688, February 2026) show that general relativity changes this picture substantially. Near an intermediate-mass black hole of 10⁵ solar masses or more, relativistic frame dragging rotates the local inertial frame as the white dwarf passes through pericenter. The tidal bulge, which was aligned with the black hole during approach, becomes misaligned with it during departure — not because the star responded too slowly, but because the frame itself has rotated.
The frame rotation reduces the phase coherence of tidal forcing across successive pericenter passages. In Newtonian gravity, each passage adds coherently to the tidal heating — the bulge from the previous passage is oriented correctly to receive the next pulse of tidal forcing. In general relativity, the frame rotation introduces a systematic misalignment that suppresses the cumulative effect. The tidal dissipation is reduced by roughly 50% compared to Newtonian predictions.
The consequences compound over time. Reduced dissipation means slower orbital circularization. But the relationship between eccentricity damping and pericenter evolution is nonlinear: in some parameter ranges, the eccentricity decreases while the pericenter distance increases — the orbit becomes rounder but wider, pushing the white dwarf further from the black hole.
The accumulated relativistic correction produces measurable distortions in gravitational wave signals — waveform mismatches of approximately 0.1 within six months of observation by space-based detectors like LISA. The frame rotation that suppresses tidal heating imprints itself on the gravitational wave phase, making the relativistic correction not just theoretically important but observationally necessary.