A Tale of Two Mergers: Searching for Strangeness in Compact Stars

Abstract

We contrast the evolution of gravitational binary mergers for the two cases of a black hole and a normal neutron star, and a black hole and a self-bound strange quark matter star. In both cases inspiral continues until the Roche limit is reached, at which point it is expected that stable mass transfer to the balck hole ensues. Whereas a neutron star would then outspiral, the strange quark matter star barely moves out at all. Eventually, the strange quark star loses all its mass to the black hole, as compared to the neutron star whose outspiral continues until stable mass transfer terminates and inspiral resumes. These scenarios result in distinctly different gravitational wave signatures.

10 pages with 6 figures - Submitted to the Strange Quark Matter 2003 Conference Proceedings

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Physics of Neutron Stars
• Strangelet propagation and cosmic ray flux
• Impact of the nuclear equation of state on the last orbits of binary neutron stars
• Cosmic ray strangelets
• Mergers of binary stars: The ultimate heavy-ion experience
• Strange stars and the cosmological constant problem
• Quark matter and the astrophysics of neutron stars