This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The main goal of this project is to build a comprehensive theoretical formalism that will model physical properties of so-called compact stars, which are the collapsed cores---about 20 kilometers in diameter but with the mass of the sun---of ordinary stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel. Like the earth, a compact star has an outer crust, magnetic field, inner layers containing one or more fluids, and perhaps even a solid core. The formalism will use state-of-the-art nuclear physics of matter at extreme densities to model compact star rotations and oscillations as well as their gravitational waves (which are the propagating ripples of spacetime curvature first predicted by Einstein soon after his completion of General Relativity).
When completed, the formalism will naturally tie into key research goals of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), designed to detect the gravitational waves produced by compact stars. Gravitational wave, or even upper limit, data obtained by LIGO can be used to test compact star models to yield an improved understanding of the nuclear physics and fluid and solid behavior of matter at extreme densities, potentially large magnetic fields, and gravitational fields that are so large that general relativity must be used to get accurate results.
