Boson Star Mergers as Alternatives to Standard Compact Object Mergers

Instead of studying an alternative to general relativity, one can instead consider boson stars as an alternative model. In particular, for certain potentials, boson stars have compactnesses that approach those of black holes. We evolve very compact boson stars constructed with a solitonic potential in orbit through merger and study the resulting gravitational waves for comparison to those of black hole binaries and neutron star binaries.