Gravitational Wave Heating

TL;DR

This paper models how gravitational waves dissipate energy into viscous matter shells, significantly heating the matter and potentially affecting astrophysical phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for gravitational wave energy transfer to matter shells and derives a temperature distribution using spherical harmonics.

Findings

Temperature increase can reach about 10^6 K.

Damping of GWs in viscous shells can be nearly complete.

The model demonstrates astrophysical significance of GW-induced heating.

Abstract

It was shown in previous work that when a gravitational wave (GW) passes through a viscous shell of matter the magnitude of the GW will be damped and there are astrohysical circumstances in which the damping is almost complete. The energy transfer from the GWs to the fluid will increase its temperature. We construct a model for this process and obtain an expression for the temperature distribution inside the shell in terms of spherical harmonics. Further, it is shown that this effect is astrophysically significant: a model problem is constructed for which the temperature increase is of order $10^6{}^\circ$K.