Quasinormal modes of relativistic stars and interacting fields

Understand

The quasinormal modes of relativistic compact objects encode important information about the gravitational response associated with astrophysical phenomena.

• Detecting such oscillations would provide us with a unique understanding of the properties of compact stars, and may give definitive evidence for the existence of black holes.
• However, computing quasinormal modes in realistic astrophysical environments is challenging due to the complexity of the spacetime background and of the dynamics of the perturbations.
• We discuss two complementary methods for computing the quasinormal modes of spherically symmetric astrophysical systems, namely, the direct integration method and the continued-fraction method.