Mountains on Neutron Stars: Accreted vs. Non-Accreted crusts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare the two cases of an isolated neutron star, with a non-accreted crust, and that of an accreting neutron star, with an accreted crust, and try to estimate which one of the two would make a better source of gravitational waves. In order to do this we must evaluate the maximum ``mountain'' that the crust can sustain in these two cases. We first do this using the formalism of Ushomirsky, Cutler and Bildsten (2000) and find that the maximum quadrupole is very similar in the two cases, with the non-accreted crust sustaining a slightly larger mountain. We then develop a perturbation formalism for the problem, that allows us to drop the Cowling approximation and have more control over the boundaries. The use of this formalism confirms that there is not much difference between the two cases, but leads to results approximately one order of magnitude larger than those we obtain with the formalism of Ushomirsky, Cutler and Bildsten (2000).

Accepted by MNRAS

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Modelling magnetically deformed neutron stars
• Detecting gravitational wave emission from the known accreting neutron stars
• Relativistic models of magnetars: structure and deformations
• Phase separation in the crust of accreting neutron stars
• Are neutron stars with crystalline colour superconducting cores interesting for the LIGO experiment?
• On the stability of precessing superfluid neutron stars
• Constraining crystalline color superconducting quark matter with gravitational-wave data
• Gravitational radiation from crystalline color-superconducting hybrid stars
• Three-dimensional stability of magnetically confined mountains on accreting neutron stars
• Do superfluid instabilities prevent neutron star precession?
• Gravitational excitation of high frequency QPOs
• Detecting gravitational waves from accreting neutron stars