The long-term evolution of the GW170817 remnant

2024/03/13 by Jie Zhang, Liu, Menquan, Cong Wang +2
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #GNSS positioning and interference #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.08223

openalex publication_date 2024/03/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

GW170817 represents the first observed binary neutron star merger event by humanity. The observation of GW170817 has identified the correlation between Kilonova, gravitational wave and short GRB. The shocks from GW170817 have the capacity to inject significant thermal and kinetic energies into the interstellar medium and evolve for over a million years. In this letter, we adopt the special relativity fluid dynamics equations to simulate the evolution of the GW170817 remnant over a span of one million years. Our simulations yield the evolution profiles of the velocity, density, mass, radius, luminosity, and energies of the remnant. We estimate that the GW170817 remnant will reach the average maximum luminosity 2.56× 10³⁹ erg s^-1at approximately 3.96× 10⁴ yr. At the end of the cooling stage, the contaminated radius and mass are 48.35 pc and 2.25× 10⁴ M_\odot, respectively.

Related

• A long-lived remnant neutron star after GW170817 inferred from its associated kilonova
• The lifetime of binary neutron star merger remnants
• The allowed parameter space of a long-lived neutron star as the merger remnant of GW170817
• Analyzing GW231109₂35456 and understanding its potential implications for population studies, nuclear physics, and multi-messenger astronomy
• Search for gravitational waves from a long-lived remnant of the binary neutron star merger GW170817