Unstable modes of hypermassive compact stars driven by viscosity and gravitational radiation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the oscillation modes of differentially rotating hypermassive neutron star remnants, analyzing how viscosity and gravitational radiation induce instabilities similar to known stellar instabilities, with implications for gravitational wave signals.

Contribution

It models these stars as incompressible Riemann ellipsoids and explores the effects of viscosity and gravitational radiation on their stability and mode behavior, revealing new instability characteristics.

Findings

Odd-parity modes are unstable for all f values except spherical models.

High eccentricity ellipsoids exhibit unstable even-parity modes.

Turbulent viscosity can suppress gravitational wave instabilities.

Abstract

We study the oscillations modes of differential rotating remnants of binary neutron star inspirals by modeling them as incompressible Riemann ellipsoids parametrized by the ratio $f$ of their internal circulation to the rotation frequency. The effects of viscosity and gravitational wave radiation on the modes are studied and it is shown that these bodies exhibit generic instabilities towards gravitational wave radiation akin to the Chandrasekhar--Friedman--Schutz instabilities for uniformly rotating stars. The odd-parity modes are unstable for all values of $f$ (except for the spherical model) and deformations, whereas the even parity unstable modes appear only in highly eccentric ellipsoids. We quantify the modification of the modes with varying mass of the model and the magnitude of the viscosity. The modes are weakly dependent on the range of the masses relevant to the binary neutron star mergers. Large turbulent viscosity can lead to a suppression of the gravitational wave instabilities, whereas kinematical viscosity has a negligible influence on the modes and their damping timescales.