Binary Love Relations

Abstract

When in a tight binary, the mutual tidal deformations of neutron stars imprint onto observables, encoding information about their internal structure at supranuclear densities and gravity in the extreme-gravity regime. Gravitational wave observations of their late binary inspiral may serve as a tool to extract the individual tidal deformabilities, but this is made difficult by degeneracies between them in the gravitational wave model. We here resolve this problem by discovering approximately universal relations between dimensionless combinations of the individual tidal deformabilities. We show that these relations break degeneracies in the gravitational wave model, allowing for the accurate extraction of both deformabilities. Such measurements can be used to better differentiate between equation-of-state models, and improve tests of General Relativity and cosmology.