Radio transients from stellar tidal disruption by massive black holes

By D. Giannios, B. Metzger. 2011

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole provides us with a rare glimpse of these otherwise dormant beasts. It has long been predicted that the disruption will be accompanied by a thermal ‘flare’, powered by the accretion of bound stellar debris. Several candidate disruptions have been discovered in this manner at optical, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. Here we explore the observational consequences if a modest fraction of the accretion power is channelled into an ultrarelativistic outflow. We show that a relativistic jet decelerates due to its interaction with the interstellar medium at subparsec distances from the black hole. Synchrotron radiation from electrons accelerated by the reverse shock powers a bright radio–infrared transient that peaks on a time-scale ∼1 yr after disruption. Emission from the forward shock may be detectable for several years after the peak. Deep radio follow-up observations of tidal disruption candidates at late times can test for the presence of relativistic ejecta. Upcoming radio transient surveys may independently discover tens to hundreds of tidal disruptions per year, complimenting searches at other wavelengths. Non-thermal emission from tidal disruption probes the physics of jet formation under relatively clean conditions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/291f53422c35a9fc3d1704bfb242f6c0618b8df2

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Citations in the corpus

THE ULTRAVIOLET-BRIGHT, SLOWLY DECLINING TRANSIENT PS1-11af AS A PARTIAL TIDAL DISRUPTION EVENT (2013, background): “Models of the spectral energy distributions (SED) of TDEs and their evolution have grown increasingly complex over time, starting with thin disk models and adding thick disks and outflows or winds to model superEddington accretion (Loeb & Ulmer 1997; Ulmer 1999; Strubbe & Quataert 2009, 2011; Lodato”
Swift J1644+57 gone MAD: the case for dynamically-important magnetic flux threading the black hole in a jetted tidal disruption event (2013, background): “…suggesting that it instead results from synchrotron emission powered by the shock interaction between the relativistic jet and the surrounding circumnuclear medium (Giannios & Metzger 2011; Zauderer et al. 2011; Metzger et al. 2012; Berger et al. 2012; Wiersema et al. 2012; Zauderer et al. 2012).”
Disc formation from tidal disruptions of stars on eccentric orbits by Schwarzschild black holes (2015, background): “This flare could also be accompanied by a radio signal associated with a relativistic jet originating from the inner region of the disc (Giannios & Metzger 2011).”
Tidal Disruption Events (2013, background): “In fact, a class of ”jetted-TDEs” had actually been predicted by Giannios & Metzger (2011), but their models focused on off-axis emission from the interaction of the jet with the interstellar medium, and radio searches had only yielded a few late-time detections (Bower 2011; Bower et al. 2013),…”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “Examples include optical and gamma ray variability in blazars (Hovatta et al. 2014), radio transients associated with tidal disruption flares (Giannios & Metzger 2011), and radio counterparts to supernovae and GRBs (Gal-Yam et al. 2006).”