[Submitted on 7 Jun 2026] (cross-list from astro-ph.HE)
Post-Merger Gravitational-Wave Uncertainties of Binary Neutron Stars under Multi-Messenger EOS Constraints
Yong-Jia Huang🇨🇳 · Luca Baiotti🇯🇵
The high-frequency gravitational waves emitted by a binary neutron star merger remnant carry information on matter at densities and temperatures beyond those reached in isolated neutron stars. We quantify how tightly current multi-messenger constraints already determine the dominant post-merger frequency . Adopting a set of cold equations of state (EOSs) constrained jointly by gravitational-wave tidal deformability, NICER mass--radius measurements, massive-pulsar masses, chiral effective field theory at low density, and perturbative QCD at asymptotically high density, for each binary mass we select the softest and stiffest models of the multi-messenger posterior and follow their coalescence with fully general-relativistic hydrodynamics simulations. Together with a broad set of EOSs drawn from the literature ( models in total), these simulations show that, once the binary mass and a single measure of the stellar compactness ( or ) are held fixed, the residual spread of is only , a factor of several below the range spanned by an EOSs set including those already disfavored by the data. This tight calibration of the cold-matter prediction implies that a future high-frequency detection departing from it would point directly to additional physics, such as a hadron--quark transition occurring at finite temperature. We further confirm the quasi-universal relation to within , which provides a model-independent estimate of from the secondary spectral peaks.
- Comments:
- 9 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravity as an invited article for the Focus Issue "Focus on insights from kHz Gravitational Waves"
- Subjects:
- High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
- arXiv:
- 2606.08522 [pdf]