Head-on collisions and orbital mergers of Proca stars
Nicolas Sanchis-Gual, Carlos Herdeiro, Jos\'e A. Font, Eugen Radu,, Fabrizio Di Giovanni

TL;DR
This study investigates the outcomes of head-on collisions and orbital mergers of Proca stars, revealing how their compactness influences whether they form stable remnants, hypermassive stars, or black holes, with distinctive gravitational wave signatures.
Contribution
It provides the first detailed numerical analysis of both head-on and orbital mergers of Proca stars, highlighting the dependence on compactness and the resulting gravitational wave signals.
Findings
Small compactness leads to stable Proca star remnants.
High compactness results in black hole formation after collision.
Distinct gravitational wave signatures reveal transient Proca states.
Abstract
Proca stars are self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates obtained as numerical stationary solutions of the Einstein-(complex)-Proca system. These solitonic can be both stable and form dynamically from generic initial data by the mechanism of gravitational cooling. In this paper we further explore the dynamical properties of these solitonic objects by performing both head-on collisions and orbital mergers of equal mass Proca stars, using fully non-linear numerical evolutions. For the head-on collisions, we show that the end point and the gravitational waveform from these collisions depends on the compactness of the Proca star. Proca stars with sufficiently small compactness collide leaving a stable Proca star remnant. But more compact Proca stars collide to form a transient Proca star, which ends up decaying into a black hole, albeit temporarily surrounded by Proca…
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