Gravitational-Wave Emission from Rotating Gravitational Collapse

Abstract

We present results for the gravitational radiation from the collapse to a black hole of rotating relativistic polytropes. The wave form closely resembles that emitted by a test particle infalling into a black hole, but the amplitude is reduced and opposite in sign. Less than 0.07% of the star's mass is converted to gravitational-wave energy. With sufficient rotation, the star bounces and no black hole forms. These results were obtained with a fully general-relativistic computer code that evolves rotating axisymmetric configurations and directly computes their gravitational-radiation emission.