Ricerc@Sapienza

Core collapse supernovae are extraordinary stellar explosions that mark the death throes of massive stars, with mass greater than eight to ten times the mass of the Sun. Such explosions are the dominant source of elements in the Universe between oxygen and iron and are believed to be responsible for half of the elements heavier than iron. They are a key link in the origin of life in the Universe. More massive stars develop cores with masses exceeding the Chandrasekhar mass and they must undergo gravitational collapse in their deaths.
Our understanding of weak interactions (especially concerning electron capture rates), the equation of state of the star, and new computer calculations which couple general relativity, hydrodynamics and neutrino transport, are the ingredients to simulate the physics of the gravitational collapse.

However, gravitational waves (GW) and neutrino emission are the only way of directly observing the core dynamics of a supernova.
The entire process seems to have a few distinguishing characteristics. The emission consists of a first prominent peak associated with star core bounce. Then, after bounce, we have the excitation of modes in the proto-neutron star: this part of the signal can last for several 100 ms.
These feature of the GW signal should appear in every core-collapse supernova and our proposal is to use techniques of pattern recognition to extract the signal in the GW data burden produced by the advanced GW detectors LIGO and Virgo. To have an efficient computational approach we plan to develop codes dedicated to computers equipped with the last generation of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs).