Shattering Flares During Close Encounters of Neutron Stars

TL;DR

This paper shows that resonant shattering flares can happen during close neutron star encounters, offering potential electromagnetic signals to accompany gravitational wave detections, despite their rarity.

Contribution

It introduces the occurrence of shattering flares during eccentric or hyperbolic neutron star encounters and updates the encounter rate estimates in dense stellar environments.

Findings

Shattering flares can occur during close neutron star passages.

Updated encounter rate estimates are significantly lower than previous estimates.

Shattering flares can serve as electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave bursts.

Abstract

We demonstrate that resonant shattering flares can occur during close passages of neutron stars in eccentric or hyperbolic encounters. We provide updated estimates for the rate of close encounters of compact objects in dense stellar environments, which we find are substantially lower than given in previous works. While such occurrences are rare, we show that shattering flares can provide a strong electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave bursts expected from such encounters, allowing triggered searches for these events to occur.