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Critical phenomena in head-on collisions of neutron stars
1McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
Abstract:
We find type I critical collapses of compact objects modeled by a polytropic equation of state (EOS) with a polytropic index Gamma=2 without the ultrarelativistic assumption. The object is formed in head-on collisions of neutron stars. Further, we show that the critical collapse can occur due to a change of the EOS, without fine-tuning of initial data. This opens the possibility that a neutron-star-like compact object, not just those formed in a collision, may undergo a critical collapse in processes which slowly change the EOS, such as cooling.
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