The rotational modes of relativistic stars: Numerical results

Abstract

We study the inertial modes of slowly rotating, fully relativistic compact stars. The equations that govern perturbations of both barotropic and non-barotropic models are discussed, but we present numerical results only for the barotropic case. For barotropic stars all inertial modes are a hybrid mixture of axial and polar perturbations. We use a spectral method to solve for such modes of various polytropic models. Our main attention is on modes that can be driven unstable by the emission of gravitational waves. Hence, we calculate the gravitational-wave growth timescale for these unstable modes and compare the results to previous estimates obtained in Newtonian gravity (i.e. using post-Newtonian radiation formulas). We find that the inertial modes are slightly stabilized by relativistic effects, but that previous conclusions concerning eg. the unstable r-modes remain essentially unaltered when the problem is studied in full general relativity.