Observational upper limits on the gravitational wave production of core
  collapse supernovae
  The upper limit on the energy density of a stochastic gravitational wave (GW)
background obtained from the two-year science run (S5) of the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is used to constrain the
average GW production of core collapse supernovae (ccSNe). We assume that the
ccSNe rate tracks the star formation history of the universe and show that the
stochastic background energy density depends only weakly on the assumed average
source spectrum. Using the ccSNe rate for $z\leq10$, we scale the generic
source spectrum to obtain an observation-based upper limit on the average GW
emission. We show that the mean energy emitted in GWs can be constrained within
$< (0.49-1.98){1mm} M_{\odot} c^{2}$ depending on the average source spectrum.
While these results are higher than the total available gravitational energy in
a core collapse event, second and third generation GW detectors will enable
tighter constraints to be set on the GW emission from such systems.
