Speaker
Description
We provide results of the gravitational wave energy emitted by head-on collisions of equal-mass solitonic boson stars. Our numerical simulations span a two-dimensional parameter space, where a range of values for the central amplitude of the star is considered for different values of the solitonic constant. We report gravitational wave energies emitted by the merger of fluffy (less compact) boson stars that are up to an order of magnitude higher than those emitted by a binary black hole merger. The interplay between our control parameter - the distance separating the stars dictating the time of merger - and the multiple extrema present in the solitonic potentials considered provide a surprisingly rich phenomenology. For certain values of the solitonic constant, the gravitational wave energy exhibits striking needle-sharp features across some range of central amplitudes, whilst in other regions of the parameter space it can drop discontinuously towards the value emitted by a binary black hole merger. An interpretation of all these results will be provided in the talk.
