Gravitational waves and core-collapse supernovae

TL;DR

This paper explores gravitational wave generation during nonspherical cosmic collapses and supernovae, providing estimates of wave amplitudes and frequencies, and demonstrating potential detectability with current telescopes.

Contribution

It offers new numerical estimates of gravitational wave amplitudes from supernova core collapse and cosmic structure formation, aligning with more complex models.

Findings

Estimated gravitational wave frequency ~1300 Hz from supernova core collapse.

Predicted gravitational wave amplitudes are detectable by current telescopes.

Nonspherical collapse models match results from advanced 2D and 3D simulations.

Abstract

A mechanism of formation of gravitational waves in the Universe is considered for a nonspherical collapse of matter. Nonspherical collapse results are presented for a uniform spheroid of dust and a finite-entropy spheroid. Numerical simulation results on core-collapse supernova explosions are presented for the neutrino and magnetorotational models. These results are used to estimate the dimensionless amplitude of the gravitational wave with a frequency \nu ~1300 Hz, radiated during the collapse of the rotating core of a pre-supernova with a mass of 1:2M(sun) (calculated by the authors in 2D). This estimate agrees well with many other calculations (presented in this paper) that have been done in 2D and 3D settings and which rely on more exact and sophisticated calculations of the gravitational wave amplitude. The formation of the large-scale structure of the Universe in the Zel'dovich pancake model involves the emission of very long-wavelength gravitational waves. The average amplitude of these waves is calculated from the simulation, in the uniform spheroid approximation, of the nonspherical collapse of noncollisional dust matter, which imitates dark matter. It is noted that a gravitational wave radiated during a core-collapse supernova explosion in our Galaxy has a sufficient amplitude to be detected by existing gravitational wave telescopes.