Maximum Entropy for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis: Inferring the Physical Parameters of Core-Collapse Supernovae

The gravitational wave signal arising from the collapsing iron core of a Type II supernova progenitor star carries with it the imprint of the progenitor's mass, rotation rate, degree of differential rotation, and the bounce depth. Here, we show how to infer the gravitational radiation waveform of a core collapse event from noisy observations in a network of two or more LIGO-like gravitational wave detectors and, from the recovered signal, constrain these source properties. Using these techniques, predictions from recent core collapse modeling efforts, and the LIGO performance during its S4 science run, we also show that gravitational wave observations by LIGO might have been sufficient to provide reasonable estimates of the progenitor mass, angular momentum and differential angular momentum, and depth of the core at bounce, for a rotating core collapse event at a distance of a few kpc.Comment: 44 pages, 12 figures; accepted version scheduled to appear in Ap J 1 April 200

The Discrete Hough Transform: A novel technique for detecting straight lines in binary images

: A novel technique called the Discrete Hough Transform (DHT) for detecting straight lines in digitized binary images is presented here. The algorithm employs only integer calculations and offers many advantages like higher accuracy in parameter estimation and computational efficiency, over the conventional Hough Transform algorithm. INTRODUCTION Hough transform (HT) is an interesting technique for detecting straight lines in digitized images, [5]. Each bright pixel in a binary image is mapped onto a parameter space. The location of peaks in the parameter space then give the line parameters. In the original Hough transform the slope (m) - intercept (c) parameterization of a straight line was used. Later realizing difficulty in implementation of the algorithm due to the unboundedness of both parameters m and c, the normal distance (ae) - angle of normal with the x-axis (`) parametrization was suggested by Duda and Hart [3]. In both parametric representations the transform space, also ..