Gravitational radiation from supernova explosions

Abstract

As a simple model of a supernova explosion we study a point mass exploding into two equal point masses moving back to back at high velocity, or a superposition of such elementary explosions. We employ two calculational methods. In one method we assume an infinite acceleration for zero time and calculate the gravitational field and the distribution of emitted energy. A cutoff frequency in the power spectrum is necessary to obtain a finite total energy output. The spectrum is constant from zero to this cutoff frequency. For nonrelativistic ejecta velocities the angular distribution is typical of quadrupole radiation, while for ultrarelativistic ejecta it is isotropic. To justify the infinite-acceleration approximation, we also calculate with the quadrupole approximation, using a smooth finite acceleration, and verify the previous qualitative results in the nonrelativistic limit. A brief table of fields, energies, and fluxes is given for some reasonable supernova parameters.