Strong GWs can be emitted during a gravitational collapse/explosion and, following the collapse, by the
resulting compact remnant [244, 172, 173, 73, 214, 91
, 88
, 120]. GW emission during the collapse itself
may result if the collapse or explosion involves aspherical bulk mass motion or convection. Rotational or
fragmentation instabilities encountered by the collapsing star will also produce GWs. Asymmetric neutrino
emission can also produce a strong gravitational wave signature. Neutron star remnants of
collapse may emit GWs due to the growth of rotational or
-mode instabilities. Black hole
remnants will also be sources of GWs if they experience accretion induced ringing or if the disks
around the black hole develop instabilities. All of these phenomena have the potential of being
detected by gravitational wave observatories because they involve the rapid change of dense matter
distributions.
Observation of gravitational collapse by gravitational wave detectors will provide unique information,
complementary to that derived from electromagnetic and neutrino detectors. Gravitational radiation arises
from the coherent superposition of mass motion, whereas electromagnetic emission is produced by the
incoherent superposition of radiation from electrons, atoms, and molecules. Thus, GWs carry different kinds
of information than other types of radiation. Furthermore, electromagnetic radiation interacts strongly
with matter and thus gives a view of the collapse only from lower density regions near the
surface of the star, and it is weakened by absorption as it travels to the detector. In contrast,
gravitational waves can propagate from the innermost parts of the stellar core to detectors
without attenuation by intervening matter. With their weak interaction cross-sections, neutrinos
can probe the same region probed by GWs. But whereas neutrinos are extremely sensitive to
details in the microphysics (equation of state and cross-sections), GWs are most sensitive to
physics driving the mass motions (e.g., rotation). Combined, the neutrino and the GW signals
can teach us much about the conditions in the collapsing core and ultimately the physics that
governs stellar collapse (e.g., [7, 87]). Update
The characteristics of the GW emission from gravitational collapse have been the subject of much study.
Core collapse supernovae, in particular, have been investigated as sources of gravitational radiation for more
than three decades (see, e.g., [203, 245
, 204
, 57
, 179
, 171
, 233
, 74
, 170
, 271
, 198
, 86
, 88
]). However,
during this time research has produced estimates of GW strength that vary over orders of magnitude. This
is due to the complex nature of core collapse. Important theoretical and numerical issues include
To date, collapse simulations generally include state-of-the-art treatments of only one or two of the above physics issues (often because of numerical constraints). For example, those studies that include advanced microphysics have often been run with Newtonian gravity (and approximate evaluation of the GW emission; see Section 2.4). A 3D, general relativistic collapse simulation that includes all significant physics effects is not feasible at present. However, good progress has been made on the majority of the issues listed above; the more recent work will be reviewed in some detail here.
The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Each category of gravitational collapse will be
discussed in a separate section (AIC in Section 2, collapse of massive stars in Section 3, collapsar models in
Section 4, collapse of Population III stars in Section 5, and collapse of SMSs in Section 6). Each of these
sections (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) is divided into subsection topics: collapse scenario, formation rate, GW emission
mechanisms, and numerical predictions of GW emission. In the subsections on numerical predictions, the
detectability of the GW emission from various phenomena associated with collapse is examined. In
particular, the predicted characteristics of GW emission are compared to the sensitivities of LIGO (for
sources with frequencies of to
) and LISA (for sources with lower frequencies in the range of
to
).
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