Jean-Luc Movie: /NCSA1999/NeutronStars/Meudon_161_IVP/RhoOnionPsi

Gravitational Waves from Orbiting Binary Neutron Stars

On the bottom yellow-blue slice on can see some boundary reflection running inwards (some numerical artefact), but also see ripples of wave structures flowing outwards as the two neutron stars, indicated by the two red isosurface balls, are orbiting each other. Some egg-like structure is prominent in the 3D structure of the Re{\Psi_4} field right from the beginning, and this is corotating with the neutron stars. Some kind of a dipol-like wave structure seems to escape along the z-axis a short time after evolution starts. A lot of unstructured noise is flowing outwards during the rest of the evolution.

Near the central area, where the two neutron stars rotate, a large noisy area is left behind the path of the neutron stars. This might be due to the choice of the coordinate system, which was used to compute the Re{\Psi_4} field. A radial tetrad was used for that, because Re{\Psi_4} has some interpretation in spherical symmetries at large distances, but within the orbits of the neutron stars some spherical symmetry obviously can't be assumed and so the radial tetrad reveils some differnet meaning in this context, which can't be interpreted easily as some `in- or outgoing component of the graviational field'.