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arXiv · 2608.12378

Magnus mountains on spinning neutron stars

Yashaswi Gangwar·David Ian Jones
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Abstract

We investigate the formation of a "Magnus mountain'' on a neutron star, arising from the non-axisymmetric Magnus force acting on the elastic crust by pinned superfluid vortices. Such a deformed star would act as a source of continuous gravitational waves. We consider a compressible two-component stellar model and solve the coupled equations of motion for the fluid and elastic components self-consistently, allowing the stellar deformation and the resulting mass quadrupole to be determined. For simplicity, we model the star as an infinitely long cylinder, consisting of a fluid region with a thin ocean and crust. We find that the current quadrupole is zero, while the Magnus forces are strong enough to produce (dimensionless) mass quadrupoles as large as $\sim 10^{-5}$, and so would be limited only by the finite strength of the vortex pinning and the breaking strain of the star's elastic crust. Such large deformations are promising from the point of view of the detection of continuous gravitational waves by current and future detectors, and motivate further work on more realistic stellar models.

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Yashaswi Gangwar, David Ian Jones. 2026-07-27. Magnus mountains on spinning neutron stars. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12378

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