Abstract. Our project was inspired by the prospect that a new non-electromagnetic astronomy will develop by the end of the century. Projects like Virgo and Ligo will lead to detectors able to detect extra-Galactic and Galactic sources of gravitational radiation. New generation of neutrino detectors like Superkamiokande will be able to detect various Galactic neutrino sources. All these considerations motivated us to study in detail potential Galactic sources of bursts of the gravitational radiation and neutrinos. In this paper, our projects are described in some detail. The advantages and the drawbacks of the numerical technique used in our computer simulations (pseudospectral methods) are discussed. Possible applications of the numerical methods are illustrated by some examples of astrophysical interest: coalescence of two neutron stars, mini-collapse of a neutron star (phase transition) and formation of a black hole due to the collapse of a neutron star.

INTRODUCTION

The main idea, which motivated our project, is that massive stellar cores, involved in supernovae of type II, are not the only collapsing Galactic objects generating bursts of gravitational waves that could be detected by the next generation of gravitational wave detectors. It is quite likely that SNI and SNII are only an optically detectable subset of a larger class of collapse events, which are less spectacular (as far as electromagnetic radiation is concerned) but perhaps quite frequent, and which are able to radiate a conspicuous amount of gravitational radiation.