Observational upper limits on the gravitational wave production of core collapse supernovae

Understand

The upper limit on the energy density of a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background obtained from the two-year science run (S5) of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is used to constrain the average GW production of core collapse supernovae (ccSNe).

• We assume that the ccSNe rate tracks the star formation history of the universe and show that the stochastic background energy density depends only weakly on the assumed average source spectrum.
• Using the ccSNe rate for $z\leq10$, we scale the generic source spectrum to obtain an observation-based upper limit on the average GW emission.
• 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.