Shedding light on the evolution of binary neutron star mergers
Matteo Lucca
Although the main features of the evolution of binary neutron star (NS) systems are now well established, many details are still subject to debate, especially regarding the merger and post-merger phase. For instance, the precise mechanism responsible for the production of the secondary peaks in the observable gravitational wave (GW) power spectral density is still unclear. Also the lifetime of the hyper-massive NSs formed after the merger has revealed very hard to predict. Therefore, in the attempt to shed light on these issues, I dedicated a large part of my research to the development of universal relations and a simple toy model (more details in arXiv:1909.08631 and arXiv:2010.11224) that revealed to be very powerful tools not only to simplify the interpretation of the post-merger dynamics, but also to gain insights into the physics behind it. Future work will be devoted to extending the applicability and further testing the solidity of the aforementioned results.