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Abstract

Pulsating stars are important sources of information for astrophysics. Nearly every star undergoes some kind of pulsation from the early stages of its formation until the very late ones i.e. the catastrophic creation of a supercompact object (white dwarf, neutron star or black hole). Pulsations of supercompact objects are of great importance for relativistic astrophysics since these pulsations are accompanied by the emission of gravitational radiation. In this review we shall discuss various features of neutron star pulsations i.e. the various modes of pulsation, mode excitation, detection probability and the possibility to extract information (to estimate, for example, the radius, mass and stellar equation of state) from the detection of the associated gravitational waves.