PS1-10jh: THE DISRUPTION OF A MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR OF NEAR-SOLAR COMPOSITION

By J. Guillochon, Haik Manukian, E. Ramirez-Ruiz. 2013

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When a star comes within a critical distance to a supermassive black hole (SMBH), immense tidal forces disrupt the star, resulting in a stream of debris that falls back onto the SMBH and powers a luminous flare. In this paper, we perform hydrodynamical simulations of the disruption of a main-sequence star by an SMBH to characterize the evolution of the debris stream after a tidal disruption. We demonstrate that this debris stream is confined by self-gravity in the two directions perpendicular to the original direction of the star's travel and as a consequence has a negligible surface area and makes almost no contribution to either the continuum or line emission. We therefore propose that any observed emission lines are not the result of photoionization in this unbound debris, but are produced in the region above and below the forming elliptical accretion disk, analogous to the broad-line region (BLR) in steadily accreting active galactic nuclei. As each line within a BLR is observationally linked to a particular location in the accretion disk, we suggest that the absence of a line indicates that the accretion disk does not yet extend to the distance required to produce that line. This model can be used to understand the spectral properties of the tidal disruption event PS1-10jh, for which He ii lines are observed, but the Balmer series and He i are not. Using a maximum likelihood analysis, we show that the disruption of a main-sequence star of near-solar composition can reproduce this event.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b00e53192183691f4d96f51d0466c663db9b9f3

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Citations in the corpus

Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, background): “…disk (Shen & Matzner 2014); super-Eddington outflows from the accretion disk (Strubbe & Quataert 2009); reprocessing of the accretion luminosity (Guillochon et al. 2014) by an extended outer dense screen (e.g., nonvirialized tidal debris); and synchrotron emission from an off-axis relativistic…”
Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events (2018, methodology): “This would result in a central accretion disk with R≈2Rp that is starved of mass, with much of the mass being held aloft for long periods of time in an elliptical superstructure (Ramirez-Ruiz & Rosswog 2009; Guillochon et al. 2014).”
New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, background): “A large number of these events exhibit significant reprocessing (i.e., PS1-10jh: Gezari et al. 2012, 2015; Guillochon et al. 2014, PS1-11af : Chornock et al. (2014)) and also exhibit bolometric luminosities that fall within this “reprocessing valley”.”
A CONTINUUM OF H- TO He-RICH TIDAL DISRUPTION CANDIDATES WITH A PREFERENCE FOR E+A GALAXIES (2014, background): “Guillochon et al. (2014) claim that hydrogen would not be visible 5 http://www.sdss3.org/ 6 This light curve decline rate is similar to that of Type IIL SNe, but those events typically peak at lower luminosities (Arcavi et al. 2012) compared to what is expected for a TDE. at early times even if it…”
Disc formation from tidal disruptions of stars on eccentric orbits by Schwarzschild black holes (2015, methodology): “This is an improvement compared to most previous investigations that used an approximate treatment of this effect (Ramirez-Ruiz & Rosswog 2009; Hayasaki et al. 2013; Guillochon et al. 2014).”
A systematic search for changing-look quasars in SDSS (2015, background): “4 shows that the luminosity has remained in the high state for the last 2000 days (observed frame) instead of decaying with a t−5/3 form expected for a TDE (e.g., Evans & Kochanek 1989; Gezari et al. 2012; Guillochon et al. 2014).”
GENERAL RELATIVISTIC HYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATION OF ACCRETION FLOW FROM A STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION (2015, background): “Some hydrodynamical simulation studies of these processes have already been carried out (Rosswog et al. 2009; Haas et al. 2012; Guillochon et al. 2014), but all previous work has been limited to durations a small fraction of that required to track the return of the majority of the star’s bound mass.”
Revisiting Optical Tidal Disruption Events with iPTF16axa (2017, background): “Proposed explanations include the chemical composition of the progenitor star (Gezari et al. 2012), and photoionization conditions in the debris disk (Guillochon et al. 2014) or an opticallythick reprocessing envelope (Roth et al. 2016).”
Circularization of Tidally Disrupted Stars around Spinning Supermassive Black Holes (2015, background): “…simulations of circularization for parabolic orbits around intermediate mass black holes (∼ 103 M ), where purely hydrodynamic effects circularize tidally stretched debris (Ramirez & Rosswog 2009); although these are expected to be ineffective for SMBH-like mass ratios (Guillochon et al. 2014).”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “More detailed photo-ionization and radiative transfer calculations will be required to create more concrete predictions for these emission line diagnostics, and how they vary with the other properties of the system using considerations similar to those in Guillochon et al. (2014).”
PS16dtm: A Tidal Disruption Event in a Narrow-line Seyfert 1 Galaxy (2017, methodology): “In Figure 15 we show the bolometric light curve of PS16dtm and an ensemble of model realizations from TDEFit.”