Instabilities of rotating compact stars: a brief overview

Abstract

Direct observations of gravitational waves will open in the near future new windows on the Universe. Among the expected sources, instabilities of rotating compact astrophysical objects are waited to be detected with some impatience as this will sign the birth of ``gravitational waves asteroseismology'', a crucial way to improve our knowledge of matter equation of state in conditions that cannot be reproduced in a lab. However, the theoretical work needed to really get informations from to-be-detected signals is still quite large, numerical simulations having become a necessary key ingredient. This article tries to provide a short overview of the main physical topics involved in this field (general relativity, gravitational waves, instabilities of rotating fluids, {\it etc.}), concluding with a brief description of the work that was done in Paris-Meudon Observatory by Silvano Bonazzola and collaborators.