General Relativistic Hydrodynamics with Special Relativistic Riemann Solvers

We present a general and practical procedure to solve the general relativistic hydrodynamic equations by using any of the special relativistic Riemann solvers recently developed for describing the evolution of special relativistic flows. Our proposal relies on a local change of coordinates in terms of which the spacetime metric is locally Minkowskian and permits accurate numerical calculations of general relativistic hydrodynamics problems using the numerical tools developed for the special relativistic case with negligible computational cost. The feasibility of the method has been confirmed by a number of numerical experiments.