Torsional oscillations of magnetized relativistic stars

Abstract

Strong magnetic fields in relativistic stars can be a cause of crust fracturing, resulting in the excitation of global torsional oscillations. Such oscillations could become observable in gravitational waves or in high-energy radiation, thus becoming a tool for probing the equation of state of relativistic stars. As the eigenfrequency of torsional oscillation modes is affected by the presence of a strong magnetic field, we study torsional modes in magnetized relativistic stars. We derive the linearized perturbation equations that govern torsional oscillations coupled to the oscillations of a magnetic field, when variations in the metric are neglected (Cowling approximation). The oscillations are described by a single two-dimensional wave equation, which can be solved as a boundary value problem to obtain eigenfrequencies. We find that in the non-magnetized case, typical oscillation periods of the fundamental l=2 torsional modes can be nearly a factor of two larger for relativistic stars than previously computed in the Newtonian limit. For magnetized stars, we show that the influence of the magnetic field is highly dependent on the assumed magnetic field configuration and simple estimates obtained previously in the literature cannot be used for identifying normal modes observationally.