2018/08/21 by S. D. Reyes, D. Brown, Reyes, Steven +1 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.07013
openalex publication_date 2018/08/21 · openalex created_date 2022/08/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has been suggested by Weinberg et al. (2013) that an instability due to\nthe nonlinear coupling of a neutron star's tide to its p- and g-modes could\naffect the gravitational-wave phase evolution of a neutron-star binary.\nWeinberg (2016) suggests that this instability can turn on as the\ngravitational-waves pass through the sensitive band of ground-based detectors,\nalthough the size of the effect is not known. The discovery of the binary\nneutron star merger GW170817 provides an opportunity to look for evidence of\nnonlinear tides from p-g mode coupling. We compute Bayesian evidences that\ncompare waveform models that include the p-g mode coupling to models that\ndo not. Using the waveform model and priors of Essick et al. (2016) we find\nthat the observation of GW170817 is consistent with p-g mode coupling, in\nagreement with Abbott, B. P., et al. (2019a). We investigate the properties of\nthe model and find that this consistency is due to degeneracy in a large region\nof the parameter space between the the model that includes nonlinear tides from\np-g mode coupling and the standard post-Newtonian model that does not. We\ninvestigate the consistency of the GW170817 signal with regions of the\nparameter space where the effect of nonlinear tides is not degenerate with the\nstandard model. Regions of the nonlinear tide parameter space that have a\nfitting factor of less than 99 % (98.5 %) are disfavored by a Bayes factor\nof 15 (25). We conclude that the consistency of the GW170817 signal with the\nmodel of Essick et al. (2016) is due to parameter degeneracy and that regions\nwhere nonlinear tides produce a measurable effect are strongly disfavored.\n