Pseudo-Newtonian models for the equilibrium structures of rotating relativistic stars

We obtain equilibrium solutions for rotating compact stars, including special relativistic effects. The gravity is assumed to be Newtonian, but we use the active mass density, which takes into account all energies such as the motion of the fluid, internal energy and pressure energy in addition to the rest-mass energy, in computing the gravitational potential using Poisson's equation. Such a treatment could be applicable to neutron stars with relativistic motions or a relativistic equation of state. We applied Hachisu's self-consistent field (SCF) method to find spheroidal as well as toroidal sequences of equilibrium solutions. Our solutions show better agreement with general relativistic solutions than the Newtonian relativistic hydrodynamic approach, which does not take into account the active mass. Physical quantities such as the peak density and equatorial radii in our solutions agree with the general relativistic ones to within 5 per cent. Therefore our approach can be used as a simple alternative to the fully relativistic one when a large number of model calculations is necessary, as it requires much fewer computational resources.     

Absolute and convective instabilities in an inviscid compressible mixing layer

We consider the stability of a compressible shear flow separating two streams of different speeds and temperatures. The velocity and temperature profiles in this mixing layer are hyperbolic tangents. The normal mode analysis of the flow stability reduces to an eigenvalue problem for the pressure perturbation. We briefly describe the numerical method that we used to solve this problem. Then, we introduce the notions of the absolute and convective instabilities and examine the effects of Mach number, and the velocity and temperature ratios of each stream on the transition between convective and absolute instabilities. Finally, we discuss the implication of the results presented in this paper for the heliopause stability. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Cosmic-ray propagation in compressible turbulent media

The influence of compressibility of media on both the statistical acceleration and the turbulent diffusion of cosmic-ray particles is investigated. The averaging over an ensemble of random velocity fields of the medium was performed in the kinetic equation. The kinetic coefficients, which are responsible for the particle acceleration, were obtained in the cases of weak and strong scattering due inhomogeneous magnetic fields.     

Toy Stars in two dimensions

Toy Stars are gas masses where the compressibility is treated without approximations but gravity is replaced by a force which, for any pair of masses, is along their line of centres and proportional to their separation. They provide an invaluable resource for testing the suitability of numerical codes for astrophysical gas dynamics. In this paper, we derive the equations for both small-amplitude oscillations and non-linear solutions for rotating and pulsating Toy Stars in two dimensions, and show that the solutions can be reduced to a small number of ordinary differential equations. We compare the accurate solutions of these equations with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. The two-dimensional Toy Star solutions are found to provide an excellent benchmark for SPH algorithms, highlighting many of the strengths and also some weaknesses of the method.     

Dynamical instability of laminar axisymmetric flows of ideal compressible fluid

The instability of axisymmetric flows of inviscid compressible fluid with respect to two-dimensional infinitesimal perturbations with the nonconservation of angular momentum is investigated by numerically integrating the differential equations of hydrodynamics. The compressibility is taken into account for a homentropic flow with an adiabatic index varying over a wide range. The problem has been solved for two angular velocity profiles of an initial axisymmetric flow. In the first case, a power-law rotation profile with a finite enthalpy gradient at the flow edges has been specified. For this angular velocity profile, we show that the instability of sonic and surface gravity modes in a nearly Keplerian flow, when a radially variable vorticity exists in the main flow, can be explained by the combined action of the Landau mechanism and mode coupling. We also show that including a radially variable vorticity makes the limiting exponent in the rotation law at which the unstable surface gravity modes vanish dependent on the fluid compressibility. In the second case, a Keplerian rotation law with a quasi-sinusoidal deviation has been specified in such a way that the enthalpy gradient vanished at the flow edges. We have found than the sonic modes are then stabilized and the flow is unstable only with respect to the perturbations that also exist in an incompressible fluid.     

The end of the dark ages in modified Newtonian dynamics

We study the evolution of a spherically symmetric density perturbation in the Modified Newtonian Dynamics model applied to the net acceleration over Hubble flow. The background cosmological model is a Λ-dominated, low-Ω_b Friedmann model with no cold dark matter. We include thermal processes and non-equilibrium chemical evolution of the collapsing gas. We find that under these assumptions the first low-mass objects  ( M ≤ 3 × 10⁴ M_⊙)  may collapse already for   z ∼ 30  , which is in quite good agreement with the recent Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe results. A lower value of a ₀ would lead to much slower collapse of such objects.     

Temporal behaviour of global perturbations in compressible axisymmetric flows with free boundaries

The dynamics of small global perturbations in the form of a linear combination of a finite number of non‐axisymmetric eigenmodes is studied in the two‐dimensional approximation. The background flow is assumed to be an axisymmetric perfect fluid with adiabatic index γ = 5/3 rotating with a power law angular velocity distribution Γ ∝ r^–q , 1.5 < q < 2.0, confined by free boundaries in the radial direction. The substantial transient growth of acoustic energy of optimized perturbations is discovered. An optimal energy growth G is calculated numerically for a variety of parameters. Its value depends essentially on the perturbation azimuthal wavenumber m and increases for higher values of m. The closer the rotation profile to the Keplerian law, the larger growth factors can be obtained but over a longer time. The highest acoustic energy increase found numerically is of order ∼10² over ∼6 typical Keplerian periods. Slow neutral eigenmodes with corotation radius beyond the outer boundary mostly contribute to the transient growth. The revealed linear temporal behaviour of perturbations may play an important role in angular momentum transfer in toroidal flows near compact relativistic objects (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

An energy-conserving formalism for adaptive gravitational force softening in smoothed particle hydrodynamics and N-body codes

In this paper, we describe an adaptive softening length formalism for collisionless N -body and self-gravitating smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) calculations which conserves momentum and energy exactly. This means that spatially variable softening lengths can be used in N -body calculations without secular increases in energy. The formalism requires the calculation of a small additional term to the gravitational force related to the gradient of the softening length. The extra term is similar in form to the usual SPH pressure force (although opposite in direction) and is therefore straightforward to implement in any SPH code at almost no extra cost. For N -body codes, some additional cost is involved as the formalism requires the computation of the density through a summation over neighbouring particles using the smoothing kernel. The results of numerical tests demonstrate that, for homogeneous mass distributions, the use of adaptive softening lengths gives a softening which is always close to the 'optimal' choice of fixed softening parameter, removing the need for fine-tuning. For a heterogeneous mass distribution (as may be found in any large-scale N -body simulation), we find that the errors on the least-dense component are lowered by an order of magnitude compared to the use of a fixed softening length tuned to the densest component. For SPH codes, our method presents a natural and an elegant choice of softening formalism which makes a small improvement to both the force resolution and the total energy conservation at almost zero additional cost.     

High-resolution spectroscopy of QY Sge: an obscured RV Tauri variable?

We describe and demonstrate a method for increasing the resolution locally in a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) simulation, by splitting particles. We show that in simulations of self-gravitating collapse (of the sort that are presumed to occur in star formation) the method is stable, and affords great savings in computer time and memory. When applied to the standard Boss & Bodenheimer test – which has been shown to depend critically on fulfilment of the Jeans Condition – the results are comparable both with those obtained using Adaptive Mesh Refinement, and with those obtained using a standard high-resolution SPH simulation, but they are achieved with considerably less computational resource. Further development and testing is required before the method can safely be applied to more general flows.     

Why Newtonian gravity is reliable in large-scale cosmological simulations

Until now, it has been common to use Newtonian gravity to study the non-linear clustering properties of large-scale structures. Without confirmation from Einstein's theory, however, it has been unclear whether we can rely on the analysis (e.g. near the horizon scale). In this work we will provide confirmation of the use of Newtonian gravity in cosmology, based on the relativistic analysis of weakly non-linear situations to third order in perturbations. We will show that, except for the gravitational-wave contribution, the relativistic zero-pressure fluid equations perturbed to second order in a flat Friedmann background coincide exactly with the Newtonian results. We will also present the pure relativistic correction terms appearing in the third order. The third-order correction terms show that these terms are the linear-order curvature perturbation times the second-order relativistic/Newtonian terms. Thus, the pure general relativistic corrections in the third order are independent of the horizon scale and are small when considering the large-scale structure of the Universe because of the low-level temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Since we include the cosmological constant, our results are relevant to currently favoured cosmology. As we prove that the Newtonian hydrodynamic equations are valid in all cosmological scales to second order, and that the third-order correction terms are small, our result has the important practical implication that one can now use the large-scale Newtonian numerical simulation more reliably as the simulation scale approaches and even goes beyond the horizon. In a complementary situation, where the system is weakly relativistic (i.e. far inside the horizon) but fully non-linear, we can employ the post-Newtonian approximation. We also show that in large-scale structures, the post-Newtonian effects are quite small.     

Uniformly rotating homogeneous and polytropic rings in Newtonian gravity

An analytical method is presented for treating the problem of a uniformly rotating, self-gravitating ring without a central body in Newtonian gravity. The method is based on an expansion about the thin ring limit, where the cross-section of the ring tends to a circle. The iterative scheme developed here is applied to homogeneous rings up to the 20th order and to polytropes with the index   n = 1  up to the third order. For other polytropic indices no analytic solutions are obtainable, but one can apply the method numerically. However, it is possible to derive a simple formula relating mass to the integrated pressure to leading order without specifying the equation of state. Our results are compared with those generated by highly accurate numerical methods to test their accuracy.     

Evolution of astrophysical jets generated by a vortex mechanism

The nonlinear dynamics of a rotating jet is examined following its ejection from a compact gravitating object by a vortex mechanism. A scenario is described in which a dense stream expands and is subsequently transformed into a nonstationary vortex consisting of a cylindrical core and a “sheath.” At this stage of development, a converging radial flow of matter in the differentially rotating nonuniform sheath collimates the jet and speeds up the rotation of the core, as well as the flow of matter along the jet, in accordance with a power law or “explosive” instability, until the velocity discontinuity at the surface of the core approaches the sound speed. Flows of this type have low energy dissipation and can serve as unique channels for the acceleration and collimation of jet eruptions from young stars, active galactic nuclei, and quasars. Translated from Astrofizika, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 135–145 (February 2009).     

Detecting ionized bubbles in redshifted 21-cm maps

Linear transient phenomena induced by flow non-normality in thin self-gravitating astrophysical discs are studied using the shearing sheet approximation. The considered system includes two modes of perturbations: vortex and (spiral density) wave. It is shown that self-gravity considerably alters the vortex mode dynamics; its transient (swing) growth may be several orders of magnitude stronger than in the non-self-gravitating case and two to three times larger than the transient growth of the wave mode. Based on this finding, we comment on the role of vortex mode perturbations in a gravitoturbulent state. We also describe the linear coupling of the perturbation modes, caused by the differential character of disc rotation. The coupling is asymmetric: vortex mode perturbations are able to excite wave mode perturbations, but not vice versa. This asymmetric coupling lends additional significance to the vortex mode as a participant in spiral density waves and shock manifestations in astrophysical discs.     

Forced oscillations in fluid tori and quasi‐periodic oscillations

The kilo‐Hertz Quasi‐Periodic Oscillations in X‐ray binaries could originate within the accretion flow, and be a signature of non–linear fluid oscillations and mode coupling in strong gravity. The possibility to decipher these systems will impact our knowledge of fundamental parameters such as the neutron star mass, radius, and spin. Thus they offer the possibility to constrain the nuclear equation of state and the rotation parameter of stellar–mass black holes. We review the general properties of these oscillations from a hydrodynamical point of view, when the accretion flow is subject to external perturbations and summarize recent results. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)