Revised Rates of Stellar Disruption in Galactic Nuclei

By Jianxiang Wang, D. Merritt. 2003

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compute rates of tidal disruption of stars by supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei, using downwardly revised black hole masses from the MBH-σ relation. In galaxies with steep nuclear density profiles, which dominate the overall event rate, the disruption frequency varies inversely with assumed black hole mass. We compute a total rate for nondwarf galaxies of ~10-5 yr-1 Mpc-3, about a factor of 10 higher than in earlier studies. Disruption rates are predicted to be highest in nucleated dwarf galaxies, assuming that such galaxies contain black holes. Monitoring of a rich galaxy cluster for a few years could rule out the existence of intermediate-mass black holes in dwarf galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3010e74e556f188bf012d0d9dae82d7eb05dcaa6

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Citations in the corpus

Resonant Relaxation near a Massive Black Hole: The Stellar Distribution and Gravitational Wave Sources (2006, background): “…relaxation has been discussed extensively in the literature (see e.g. Lightman and Shapiro 1977; Frank & Rees 1976; Cohn & Kulsrud 1978; Syer & Ulmer 1999; Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Alexander & Hopman 2003; Merritt & Poon 2004; Wang & Merritt 2004; Hopman & Alexander 2005; Baumgardt et al. 2005).”
A Huge Drop in the X-Ray Luminosity of the Nonactive Galaxy RX J1242.6–1119A, and the First Postflare Spectrum: Testing the Tidal Disruption Scenario (2004, background): “…centers of galaxies, and an unavoidable consequence of their existence, would be occasional tidal disruption of stars and subsequent accretion of their debris by these supermassive black holes (e.g., Hills 1975; Gurzadyan & Ozernoi 1979; Carter & Luminet 1982; Rees 1988, 1990; Wang & Merritt 2004).”
Finite, Intense Accretion Bursts from Tidal Disruption of Stars on Bound Orbits (2012, background): “This motivates the assumption of nearly parabolic orbits (Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Wang & Merritt 2004).”
Fueling Low-Level AGN Activity through Stochastic Accretion of Cold Gas (2006, background): “For the rates of stellar disruptions estimated therein and by e.g. Wang & Merritt (2004) to be sufficiently high to contribute the the observed luminosity functions, the typical stellar mass disrupted must be .”
Consequences of Strong Compression in Tidal Disruption Events (2012, methodology): “…method of feeding stars into the loss cone is standard two-body relaxation, which sets a conservative lower limit on ṄTDE between 10−4 and 10−6 yr−1 E-mail: nstone@cfa.harvard.edu (Frank & Rees 1976; Lightman & Shapiro 1977; Cohn & Kulsrud 1978; Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Wang & Merritt 2004).”
The Orbital Statistics of Stellar Inspiral and Relaxation near a Massive Black Hole: Characterizing Gravitational Wave Sources (2005, unknown): “The consequences of this for the dependence of the rate for prompt tidal disruptions on the MBH mass were discussed by Wang & Merritt (2004).”
New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, background): “107.5M , the theoretical rate is ∼ 10−4 events per year (Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Wang & Merritt 2004; Stone & Metzger 2016) .”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “IMBHs, with BH masses below 10 6 M , should have higher rates of stellar disruption than SMBHs (Wang & Merritt 2004; Stone & Metzger 2016); nonetheless, most TDEs (∼50; Komossa 2015) have been associated with SMBHs (e.g., Komossa & Bade 1999; Halpern et al. 2004; Lin et al. 2011, 2015; van Velzen…”
Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, methodology): “In this paper we have relaxed and updated a number of assumptions used in past theoretical rate calculations (Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Wang & Merritt 2004) in an 10 Although we do note that one analysis of X-ray TDEs inferred a rate more consistent with our calculations, of 2.3 × 10−4 yr−1 gal−1…”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “…one order of magnitude, between the rates of TDEs predicted by modeling two-body scattering of stars in galactic nuclei of ∼ 10−4 gal−1 yr−1 (see also Wang & Merritt 2004, Merritt 2015), and the detected rates of optically-luminous TDEs of ∼ 10−5 gal−1 yr−1 (e.g. van c© 2013 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–??”
Stellar Dynamics and Stellar Phenomena Near a Massive Black Hole (2017, background): “…plunge rates shown in Figure 6 (∼ 5 × 10−4 yr−1 gal−1 for M• = 10 7 M , Bar-Or & Alexander 2016) are in line 21 with other predictions of Γt & 10−4 yr−1 gal−1 (Magorrian et al. 1998; Wang & Merritt 2004), and they all are systematically above the observed rate by ∼ ×10 (Stone & Metzger 2016).”
PS1-10jh: THE DISRUPTION OF A MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR OF NEAR-SOLAR COMPOSITION (2013, background): “…get deposited into highly-bound orbits in which the core itself is likely to be disrupted, as the densities of their cores are & 103 times larger than their envelopes, and their orbital migration into the loss-cone is largely dictated by diffusion (Wang & Merritt 2004; MacLeod et al. 2012, 2013).”
HYDRODYNAMICAL SIMULATIONS TO DETERMINE THE FEEDING RATE OF BLACK HOLES BY THE TIDAL DISRUPTION OF STARS: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE IMPACT PARAMETER AND STELLAR STRUCTURE (2012, background): “And as most of the stars that are scattered into disruptive orbits originate from the sphere of influence or beyond (Magorrian & Tremaine 1999; Wang & Merritt 2004), the orbital eccentricity of almost all disrupted stars is approximately unity3.”