Critical Phenomena in Head-on Collisions of Neutron Stars

Abstract

We found type I critical collapses of compact objects modeled by a polytropic equation of state (EOS) with polytropic index $Γ=2$ without the ultra-relativistic assumption. The object is formed in head-on collisions of neutron stars. Further we showed that the critical collapse can occur due to a change of the EOS, without fine tuning of initial data. This opens the possibility that a neutron star like compact object, not just those formed in a collision, may undergo a critical collapse in processes which slowly change the EOS, such as cooling.