Study of general relativistic shocks and their propagation in neutron stars

Abstract

Astrophysical shocks are very common and are interesting as they are responsible for particle acceleration in supernovas, blazers, and neutron stars. In this work, we study general relativistic shocks in which the shock front is at rest. We derive the jump conditions and the Taub adiabat equation for both the space-like and time-like shocks. We solve these equations for a neutron star where the shock wave is followed by a combustion front deconfining hadronic matter to quark matter. We find that the maximum mass of the daughter quark star (generated from the combustion of the parent neutron star) is consistent with the maximum mass limit for the equation of state sequence. The matter velocities under some conditions become super-luminous, which although disputed may indicate a very fast combustion process. Also, the matter velocities imply that for space-like shocks, the combustion process is most probably a deflagration, and for time-like shocks, it is a detonation and can even proceed with velocities that are super-luminous.