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Black hole formation through fragmentation of toroidal polytropes

Burkhard Zink·Nikolaos Stergioulas·Ian Hawke·Christian D. Ott·Erik Schnetter·Ewald Mueller
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Abstract

We investigate new paths to black hole formation by considering the general relativistic evolution of a differentially rotating polytrope with toroidal shape. We find that this polytrope is unstable to nonaxisymmetric modes, which leads to a fragmentation into self-gravitating, collapsing components. In the case of one such fragment, we apply a simplified adaptive mesh refinement technique to follow the evolution to the formation of an apparent horizon centered on the fragment. This is the first study of the one-armed instability in full general relativity.

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Burkhard Zink, Nikolaos Stergioulas, Ian Hawke, Christian D. Ott, Erik Schnetter, Ewald Mueller. 2005-02-11. Black hole formation through fragmentation of toroidal polytropes. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.96.161101

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