The most studied sources of gravitational wave (GW) signals are the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Here, a new class of non-merger GW sources is visualized: the end-of-life state of massive stars, which can launch relativistic, bipolar jets, inflating a turbulent "cocoon" inside of the stellar envelope. These cocoons produce quasi-isotropic GW emission over the timescale of 10s to 100s of seconds. The visualization shows a volume rendering of a three-dimensional general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical (GRMHD) simulation of jet formation from a collapsing star. With an edge-on view, color encodes the GW strain density (brighter is larger).

Methods: H-AMR code