Elastic Stars in General Relativity: III. Stiff ultrarigid exact solutions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel elastic matter equation of state allowing for light-speed longitudinal waves, enabling the derivation of exact stationary solutions in general relativity, including stable and unstable neutron star models.

Contribution

It provides a simple method to find exact rigid motion solutions in Einstein's equations using a new elastic matter model with high wave speeds.

Findings

Derived a static spherically symmetric solution with constant density and finite radius.

Identified a stable neutron star model with a mass-radius relation indicating stability.

Presented an unstable solution with decreasing energy density.

Abstract

We present an equation of state for elastic matter which allows for purely longitudinal elastic waves in all propagation directions, not just principal directions. The speed of these waves is equal to the speed of light whereas the transversal type speeds are also very high, comparable to but always strictly less than that of light. Clearly such an equation of state does not give a reasonable matter description for the crust of a neutron star, but it does provide a nice causal toy model for an extremely rigid phase in a neutron star core, should such a phase exist. Another reason for focusing on this particular equation of state is simply that it leads to a very simple recipe for finding stationary rigid motion exact solutions to the Einstein equations. In fact, we show that a very large class of stationary spacetimes with constant Ricci scalar can be interpreted as rigid motion solutions with this matter source. We use the recipe to derive a static spherically symmetric exact solution with constant energy density, regular centre and finite radius, having a nontrivial parameter that can be varied to yield a mass-radius curve from which stability can be read off. It turns out that the solution is stable down to a tenuity R/M slightly less than 3. The result of this static approach to stability is confirmed by a numerical determination of the fundamental radial oscillation mode frequency. We also present another solution with outwards decreasing energy density. Unfortunately, this solution only has a trivial scaling parameter and is found to be unstable.