Research

The gravitational wave (GW) signal resulting from stellar core collapse encodes a wealth of information about the physical parameters of the progenitor star and the resulting core-collapse supernova (CCSN). We present a novel approach to constrain CCSN progenitor properties at collapse using two of the most detectable parts of the GW signal: the core-bounce signal and evolution of the dominant frequency mode from the protoneutron star. We focus on the period after core bounce but before explosion and investigate the predictive power of GWs from rotating CCSNe to constrain properties of the progenitor star. We analyze 34 2D and four 3D neutrinoradiation-hydrodynamic simulations of stellar core collapse in progenitors of varied initial mass and rotation rate. Extending previous work, we verify the compactness of the progenitor at collapse to correlate with the early ramp-up slope, and in rotating cases, also with the core angular momentum. Combining this information with the bounce signal, we present a new analysis method to constrain the pre-collapse core compactness of the progenitor. Because these GW features occur less than a second after core bounce, this analysis could allow astronomers to predict electromagnetic properties of a resulting CCSN even before shock breakout.

Right: Entropy snapshot of 60 solar mass progenitor, nearly half a second after core bounce.

We explore the influence of progenitor mass and rotation on the gravitational-wave (GW) emission from core-collapse supernovae, during the postbounce, preexplosion, accretion-phase. We present the results from 15 two-dimensional (2D) neutrino radiation-hydrodynamic simulations from initial stellar collapse to ∼300 ms after core bounce. We examine the features of the GW signals for four zero-age main sequence (ZAMS) progenitor masses ranging from 12 M⊙ to 60 M⊙ and four core rotation rates from 0 to 3 rad/s. We find that GW strain immediately around core bounce is fairly independent of ZAMS mass and---consistent with previous findings---that it is more heavily dependent on the core angular momentum. At later times, all nonrotating progenitors exhibit loud GW emission, which we attribute to vibrational g-modes of the protoneutron star (PNS) excited by convection in the postshock layer and the standing accretion shock instability (SASI). We find that increasing rotation rates results in muting of the accretion-phase GW signal due to centrifugal effects that inhibit convection in the postshock region, quench the SASI, and slow the rate at which the PNS peak vibrational frequency increases. Additionally, we verify the efficacy of our approximate general relativistic (GR) effective potential treatment of gravity by comparing our core bounce GW strains with the recent 2D GR results of other groups.

Right: Entropy evolution of 50 solar mass progenitor, evolved within the FLASH framework.