Recent Progress in the Modeling of the Gravitational Wave Signature of Core-Collapse Supernovae

Gravitational waves (GWs) are potent messengers that can provide live and first-hand dynamical data on the intricate processes taking place deep inside the core of a dying massive star. Together with complementary information from neutrinos, the information carried by GWs may be crucial in constraining the mechanism of core-collapse supernova explosions. We discuss recent progress in the modeling of these processes and summarize most recent gravitational-wave signal estimates and, in particular, present results from recent studies on the gravitational wave emission from rotating iron core collapse and core bounce, postbounce convective overturn and protoneutron star g-mode pulsations. Making use of the ensemble of state-of-the-art theoretical gravitational waveforms, we compute upper-limit optimal matched-filtering signal-to-noise ratios based on current and advanced LIGO/GEO600/Virgo noise curves for the recent nearby core-collapse supernova 2008bk which exploded at similar to 3.9 Mpc distance from Earth. We find that detection and detailed observation of gravitational waves from SN 2008bk with current LIGO-class detectors is essentially impossible and still is problematic with advanced LIGOs. However, our analysis, based oil educated speculations on the particular gravitational-wave signatures of various proposed core-collapse supernova explosion mechanisms, suggests that current and near-future LIGO-class detectors can put strong constraints on the explosion mechanism for a galactic core-collapse supernova.