Implications of the r-mode instability of rotating relativistic stars

Abstract

Several recent surprises appear dramatically to have improved the likelihood that the spin of rapidly rotating, newly formed neutron stars (and, possibly, of old stars spun up by accretion) is limited by a nonaxisymmetric instability driven by gravitational waves. Except for the earliest part of the spin-down, the axial l=m=2 mode (an r-mode) dominates the instability, and the emitted waves may be observable by detectors with the sensitivity of LIGO II. A review of these hopeful results is followed by a discussion of constraints on the instability set by dissipative mechanisms, including viscosity, nonlinear saturation, and energy loss to a magnetic field driven by differential rotation.

20 pages LaTeX2e (stylefile included), 6 eps figures. Review to appear in the proceedings of the 9th Marcel Grossman Meeting, World Scientific, ed. V. Gurzadyan, R. Jantzen, R. Ruffini

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Rotating Stars in Relativity
• Gravitational waves from instabilities in relativistic stars
• Rotating Stars in Relativity
• Nonlinear Pulsations in Differentially Rotating Neutron Stars: Mass-Shedding-Induced Damping and Splitting of the Fundamental Mode
• Nonlinear r-modes in neutron stars: A hydrodynamical limitation on r-mode amplitudes
• Are rotating strange quark stars good sources of gravitational waves?