Three-dimensional relativistic simulations of rotating neutron-star collapse to a Kerr black hole

By Luca Baiotti, Ian Hawke, P. J. Montero, F. Löffler, Luciano Rezzolla, Nikolaos Stergioulas, J. Font, E. Seidel. 2004

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new three-dimensional fully general-relativistic hydrodynamics code using high-resolution shock-capturing techniques and a conformal traceless formulation of the Einstein equations. Besides presenting a thorough set of tests which the code passes with very high accuracy, we discuss its application to the study of the gravitational collapse of uniformly rotating neutron stars to Kerr black holes. The initial stellar models are modeled as relativistic polytropes which are either secularly or dynamically unstable and with angular velocities which range from slow rotation to the mass-shedding limit. We investigate the gravitational collapse by carefully studying not only the dynamics of the matter, but also that of the trapped surfaces, i.e., of both the apparent and event horizons formed during the collapse. The use of these surfaces, together with the dynamical horizon framework, allows for a precise measurement of the black-hole mass and spin. The ability to successfully perform these simulations for sufficiently long times relies on excising a region of the computational domain which includes the singularity and is within the apparent horizon. The dynamics of the collapsing matter is strongly influenced by the initial amount of angular momentum in the progenitor star and, for initial models with sufficiently high angular velocities, the collapse can lead to the formation of an unstable disc in differential rotation. All of the simulations performed with uniformly rotating initial data and a polytropic or ideal-fluid equation of state show no evidence of shocks or of the presence of matter on stable orbits outside the black hole.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf5a9c27a4d3ec9cf9b44447a146064041bef610

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Citations in the corpus

Maximum mass, moment of inertia and compactness of relativistic stars (2016, background): “…barotropic star if the perturbation satisfies the same equation of state of the equilibrium model), for rotating stars it is only a sufficient condition for a secular instability, although it is commonly used to find a dynamical instability in simulations (Baiotti et al. 2005; Radice et al. 2010).”
THC: a new high-order finite-difference high-resolution shock-capturing code for special-relativistic hydrodynamics (2012, methodology): “Again, using as reference the Whisky code, the use of the HLLE solver with PPM reconstruction and with artificial compression, leads to a maximum density which is 71% of the analytic solution.”
Isolated and Dynamical Horizons and Their Applications (2004, methodology): “Recent numerical simulations of the gravitational collapse of uniformly rotating neutron stars to Kerr black holes [31] provide other examples which are physically much more interesting.”
Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “Scenarios closer to reality require numerical calculations (Baiotti et al., 2005; Baiotti & Rezzolla, 2006).”
A 3+1 perspective on null hypersurfaces and isolated horizons (2005, background): “[19,27] show that the isolated horizon notion becomes a good approximation quite fastly after the black hole formation).”
High Order Strong Stability Preserving Time Discretizations (2009, methodology): “They have been employed in a variety of application areas, including compressible flow [91], incompressible flow [70], viscous flow [85], two-phase flow [6, 3], relativistic flow [16, 1, 95], cosmological hydrodynamics [19], magnetohydrodynamics [2], radiation hydrodynamics [64], two-species plasma ”
The black hole accretion code (2016, methodology): “nd the average magnetic eld components at the cell center. By construction, in this way we obtain a divergence-free initial condition using either of the discretization of divergence in Eqs. (135) or (47). Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Funding This re”
Beyond second-order convergence in simulations of binary neutron stars in full general-relativity (2013, background): “More specifically WhiskyTHC solves the equations of general-relativistic hydrodynamics in conservation form (Banyuls et al. 1997) using a finite-difference scheme that employs flux reconstruction in localcharacteristic variables using the MP5 scheme (Suresh & Huynh 1997).”