Irrotational and Incompressible Ellipsoids in the First Post-Newtonian Approximation of General Relativity

Abstract

First post-Newtonian (1PN) hydrostatic equations for an irrotational fluid which have been recently derived are solved for an incompressible star. The 1PN configurations are expressed as a deformation of the Newtonian irrotational Riemann ellipsoid using Lagrangian displacement vectors introduced by Chandrasekhar. For the 1PN solutions, we also calculate the luminosity of gravitational waves in the 1PN approximation using the Blanchet-Damour formalism. It is found that the solutions of the 1PN equations exhibit singularities at points where the axial ratios of semi-axes are 1:0.5244:0.6579 and 1:0.2374:0.2963, and the singularities seem to show that at the points, the irrotational Riemann ellipsoid is unstable to the deformation induced by the effect of general relativity. For stable cases (a_2/a_1 > 0.5244, where a_1 and a_2 are the semi-major and minor axes, respectively) we find that when increasing the 1PN correction, the angular velocity and total angular momentum increase, while the total energy and luminosity of gravitational waves decrease. These 1PN solutions will be useful when examining the accuracy of numerical code for obtaining relativistic irrotational stars. We also investigate the validity of an ellipsoidal approximation, in which a 1PN solution is obtained assuming an ellipsoidal figure and neglecting the deformation. It is found that for $a_2/a_1 > 0.7$, the ellipsoidal approximation gives a fairly accurate result for the energy, angular momentum, and angular velocity, although in the approximation we cannot find the singularities.