Radiation driven instability of rapidly rotating relativistic stars: criterion and evolution equations via multipolar expansion of gravitational waves

Abstract

I suggest a novel approach for deriving evolution equations for rapidly rotating relativistic stars affected by radiation-driven Chandrasekhar-Friedman-Schutz (CFS) instability. This approach is based on the multipolar expansion of gravitational wave emission and appeals to the global physical properties of the star (energy, angular momentum, and thermal state), but not to canonical energy and angular momentum, which is traditional. It leads to simple derivation of the CFS instability criterion for normal modes and the evolution equations for a star, affected by this instability. The approach also gives a precise form to simple explanation of the CFS instability: it occurs when two conditions met: (a) gravitational wave emission removes angular momentum from the rotating star (thus releasing the rotation energy) and (b) gravitational waves carry less energy, than the released amount of the rotation energy. Results are illustrated by r-mode instability in slowly rotating Newtonian stars. In resulting evolution equations emission of gravitational waves directly affects the spin frequency, being in line with the arguments by Levin & Ushomirsky (2001), but in contrast to widely accepted equations by Lindblom et al. (1998); Ho & Lai (2000), there effective spin frequency decrease is coupled with dissipation of unstable mode. This problem, initially stressed by Levin & Ushomirsky (2001), is shown to be superficial, and arises as a result of definition of the effective spin frequency by Lindblom et al. (1998); Ho & Lai (2000). Namely, it is shown, that if this definition is taken into account properly, the evolution equations coincide with obtained here in the leading order in mode amplitude. I also argue that the next-to-leading order terms in evolution equations (which differ for Owen et al. 1998 and Ho & Lai 2000) require clarification and thus it would be more self-consistent to omit them.