Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events

By B. Mockler, J. Guillochon, E. Ramirez-Ruiz. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While once rare, observations of stars being tidally disrupted by supermassive black holes are quickly becoming commonplace. To continue to learn from these events, it is necessary to robustly and systematically compare our growing number of observations with theory. We present a tidal disruption module for the Modular Open Source Fitter for Transients (MOSFiT) and the results from fitting 14 tidal disruption events (TDEs). Our model uses FLASH simulations of TDEs to generate bolometric luminosities and passes these luminosities through viscosity and reprocessing transformation functions to create multiwavelength light curves. It then uses an MCMC fitting routine to compare these theoretical light curves with observations. We find that none of the events show evidence for viscous delays exceeding a few days, supporting the theory that our current observing strategies in the optical/UV are missing a significant number of viscously delayed flares. We find that the events have black hole masses of 106–108 M⊙ and that the masses we predict are as reliable as those based on bulk galaxy properties. We also find that there is a preference for stars with mass <1 M⊙, as expected when low-mass stars greatly outnumber high-mass stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/598f7391f47801e6f0f7a148d2a8d6914e7491c6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Metzger
2. Bing Zhang
3. E. Berger
4. E. Ramirez-Ruiz
5. Masaomi Tanaka
6. Nozomu Tominaga
7. E. Nakar
8. D. Perley

In Instrumentation

1. S. Gezari
2. B. Mockler
3. S. Cenko
4. M. Miller
5. E. Ramirez-Ruiz
6. J. Sollerman
7. S. Dhawan
8. J. Neill

Citations in the corpus

• A Unified Model for Tidal Disruption Events (2018, background): “However, the light curves of most observed TDEs have exhibited temporal pattern similar to the fallback rate, indicating short circularization and viscous timescales (Mockler et al. 2018).”
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, methodology): “This has already been tested against a small sample of post-peak light curves (Mockler et al. 2019).”
• The fast, luminous ultraviolet transient AT2018cow: extreme supernova, or disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole? (2018, methodology): “Additionally, we fit the light curve in the g, r, and UVOT w2 bands with the MOSFiT TDE model (Guillochon et al. 2018; Mockler et al. 2018).”