Work

Tidal heating in binary inspiral of strange quark stars

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We investigate tidal heating associated with the binary inspiral of strange quark stars and its impact on the resulting gravitational wave signal. Tidal heating during the merger of neutron stars composed of nuclear matter may be considered negligible, but it has been demonstrated recently that the presence of hyperons at high densities could significantly enhance the dissipation during inspiral. In this work, we evaluate the bulk viscosity arising from nonleptonic weak processes involving quarks and show that it can be several orders of magnitude higher than the viscosity of nuclear matter at temperatures relevant to the inspiral phase of the merger of strange stars. We model strange quark matter in the normal phase using a nonideal bag model including electrons and ensure compatibility with astrophysical constraints. By analyzing equal-mass binary systems with component masses ranging from 1.4 to $1.8{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, we find that temperatures close to 0.1 MeV are reached by the end of the inspiral phase. We also estimate the effect on the gravitational waveform and conclude that the additional phase shift could range from 0.1 to 0.5 radians for strange quark masses of 200 MeV, making it potentially detectable by next-generation gravitational wave detectors. Given that tidal heating from hyperons is dominant only for very massive neutron stars having masses 1.8 to 2.0 ${M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, a successful detection of this phase shift during the inspiral of binary systems with relatively low masses of 1.4 to $1.6{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$ could be a smoking gun signature for the existence of strange quark stars.

Source: Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

DOI: 10.1103/h9r7-ld41

Authors: Suprovo Ghosh, José Luis Hernández, Bikram Keshari Pradhan, Cristina Manuel, Debarati Chatterjee, Laura Tolos