Dynamical bar-mode instability in spinning bosonic stars

Abstract

Spinning bosonic stars (SBSs) can form from the gravitational collapse of a dilute cloud of scalar/Proca particles with non-zero angular momentum. In a recent work we found that the scalar stars are transient due to a non-axisymmetric instability which triggers the loss of angular momentum. We further study the dynamical formation of SBSs using 3-dimensional numerical-relativity simulations of the Einstein-(massive, complex)Klein-Gordon system and of the Einstein-(complex)Proca system. We incorporate a quartic self-interaction potential in the scalar case to gauge its effect on the instability; we investigate (m=2) Proca stars to assess their stability; we attempt to relate the instability of SBSs to the growth rate of azimuthal density modes and the existence of a corotation point. We show that: the self-interaction potential can only delay the instability in scalar SBSs; m=2 Proca stars always migrate to the stable m=1 spheroidal family; unstable m=2 Proca stars and m=1 scalar boson stars exhibit a corotation point. This establishes a parallelism with rotating neutron stars affected by dynamical bar-mode instabilities. We compute the gravitational waves (GWs) emitted and investigate the detectability of the waveforms comparing the characteristic strain of the signal with the sensitivity curves of a variety of detectors, computing the signal-to-noise ratio. By assuming that the characteristic damping timescale of the bar-like deformation in SBSs is only set by GWs emission and not by viscosity (unlike in neutron stars), we find that the post-collapse emission could be orders of magnitude more energetic than that of the bar-mode instability itself. Our results indicate that GW observations of SBSs might be within the reach of future experiments, offering a potential means to establish the existence of such stars and to place tight constraints on the mass of the bosonic particle.