GRAVITATIONAL-RADIATION FROM COALESCING BINARY NEUTRON-STARS

We calculate the gravitational radiation produced by the merger and co alescence of inspiraling binary neutron stars using three-dimensional numerical simulations. The stars are modeled as polytropes and start o ut in the point-mass limit at wide separation. The hydrodynamic integr ation is performed using smooth particle hydrodynamics with Newtonian gravity, and the gravitational radiation is calculated using the quadr upole approximation. We have run several simulations, varying both the neutron-star radius and the equation of state. The resulting gravitat ional wave energy spectra dE/df are rich in information about the hydr odynamics of merger and coalescence. In particular, our results demons trate that detailed information on both GM/Rc(2) and the equation of: state can in principle be extracted from the spectrum.