The mass ejection from the merger of binary neutron stars

Kenta Hotokezaka; Kenta Kiuchi; Koutarou Kyutoku; Hirotada Okawa; Yu-ichiro Sekiguchi; Masaru Shibata; Keisuke Taniguchi

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.87.024001

paper

The mass ejection from the merger of binary neutron stars

arXiv:1212.0905 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.87.024001

Abstract

Numerical-relativity simulations for the merger of binary neutron stars are performed for a variety of equations of state (EOSs) and for a plausible range of the neutron-star mass, focusing primarily on the properties of the material ejected from the system. We find that a fraction of the material is ejected as a mildly relativistic and mildly anisotropic outflow with the typical and maximum velocities $\sim 0.15$ -- $0.25 c$ and $\sim 0.5$ -- $0.8 c$ (where $c$ is the speed of light), respectively, and that the total ejected rest mass is in a wide range $1 0^{- 4}$ -- $1 0^{- 2} M_{⊙}$ , which depends strongly on the EOS, the total mass, and the mass ratio. The total kinetic energy ejected is also in a wide range between $1 0^{49}$ and $1 0^{51} ergs$ . The numerical results suggest that for a binary of canonical total mass $2.7 M_{⊙}$ , the outflow could generate an electromagnetic signal observable by the planned telescopes through the production of heavy-element unstable nuclei via the $r$ -process or through the formation of blast waves during the interaction with the interstellar matter, if the EOS and mass of the binary are favorable ones.

28 pages, 19 figures, accepted to Physical Review D

The mass ejection from the merger of binary neutron stars

Abstract

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