Gravitational waves and kicks from the merger of unequal mass, highly compact boson stars

Understand

Boson stars have attracted much attention in recent decades as simple, self-consistent models of compact objects and also as self-gravitating structures formed in some dark-matter scenarios.

• Direct detection of these hypothetical objects through electromagnetic signatures would be unlikely because their bosonic constituents are not expected to interact significantly with ordinary matter and radiation.
• However, binary boson stars might form and coalesce emitting a detectable gravitational wave signal which might distinguish them from ordinary compact object binaries containing black holes and neutron stars.
• We study the merger of two boson stars by numerically evolving the fully relativistic Einstein-Klein-Gordon equations for a complex scalar field with a solitonic potential that generates very compact boson stars.