# Observational upper limits on the gravitational wave production of core collapse supernovae - General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract: The upper limit on the energy density of a stochastic gravitational wave GWbackground obtained from the two-year science run S5 of the LaserInterferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory LIGO is used to constrain theaverage GW production of core collapse supernovae ccSNe. We assume that theccSNe rate tracks the star formation history of the universe and show that thestochastic background energy density depends only weakly on the assumed averagesource spectrum. Using the ccSNe rate for $z\leq10$, we scale the genericsource spectrum to obtain an observation-based upper limit on the average GWemission. We show that the mean energy emitted in GWs can be constrained within$< 0.49-1.98{1mm} M {\odot} c^{2}$ depending on the average source spectrum.While these results are higher than the total available gravitational energy ina core collapse event, second and third generation GW detectors will enabletighter constraints to be set on the GW emission from such systems.

Author: Xing-Jiang Zhu, Eric Howell, David Blair

Source: https://arxiv.org/