Dynamical instability of differentially rotating stars

Abstract

We study the dynamical instability against bar-mode deformation of differentially rotating stars. We performed numerical simulation and linear perturbation analysis adopting polytropic equations of state with the polytropic index $n=1$. It is found that rotating stars of a high degree of differential rotation are dynamically unstable even for the ratio of the kinetic energy to the gravitational potential energy of $O(0.01)$. Gravitational waves from the final nonaxisymmetric quasistationary states are calculated in the quadrupole formula. For rotating stars of mass $1.4M_{\odot}$ and radius several 10 km, gravitational waves have frequency several 100 Hz and effective amplitude $\sim 5 \times 10^{-22}$ at a distance of $\sim 100$ Mpc.

5 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS