GRAVITATIONAL-RADIATION FROM SUPERNOVAE

We draw attention to the analogy, between the collapse of-a rotating s tellar core to form a neutron star in a supernova explosion and the co llapse of a rotating molecular cloud core to form a protostar. In part icular, we speculate that the propensity of collapsing molecular cores to fragment and produce binary and multiple systems of stars is an in dication that collapse in a supernova to nuclear densities occurs via a succession of fragmentations which are damped out by gravitational r adiation. If so, this would imply that a large fraction (up to 1 per c ent) of the energy available in a supernova explosion is normally emit ted in the form of gravitational waves.