Non-axisymmetric oscillations of rapidly rotating relativistic stars by conformal flatness approximation

Abstract

We present a new numerical code to compute non-axisymmetric eigenmodes of rapidly rotating relativistic stars by adopting spatially conformally flat approximation of general relativity. The approximation suppresses the radiative degree of freedom of relativistic gravity and the field equations are cast into a set of elliptic equations. The code is tested against the low-order f- and p-modes of slowly rotating stars for which a good agreement is observed in frequencies computed by our new code and those computed by the full theory. Entire sequences of the low order counter-rotating f-modes are computed, which are susceptible to an instability driven by gravitational radiation.Comment: 3 figures. To appear in Phys.Rev.