Swift J1644+57 gone MAD: the case for dynamically-important magnetic flux threading the black hole in a jetted tidal disruption event

By A. Tchekhovskoy, B. Metzger, D. Giannios, Luke Zoltan Kelley Princeton, Columbia, Purdue, Harvard-CfA. 2013

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The unusual transient Swift J1644+57 likely resulted from a collimated relativistic jet, powered by the sudden onset of accretion onto a massive black hole (BH) following the tidal disruption (TD) of a star. However, several mysteries cloud the interpretation of this event, including (1) the extreme flaring and ‘plateau’ shape of the X-ray/ -ray light curve during the first t ttrig 10 days after the ray trigger; (2) unexpected rebrightening of the forward shock radio emission at t ttrig months; (3) lack of obvious evidence for jet precession, despite the misalignment typically expected between the angular momentum of the accretion disk and BH; (4) recent abrupt shut-o in the jet X-ray emission at t ttrig 1:5 years. Here we show that all of these seemingly disparate mysteries are naturally resolved by one assumption: the presence of strong magnetic flux threading the BH. Just after the TD event, is dynamically weak relative to the high rate of fall-back accretion ˙ M, such that the accretion

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations (2017, background): “Disc tilt has been invoked to explain quasiperiodic oscillations (QPOs) in BH systems (Stella & Vietri 1998; Ingram, Done & Fragile 2009) and variability in the jet orientation (Agudo et al. 2012; Stone & Loeb 2012; Lister et al. 2013, 2016; Tchekhovskoy et al. 2014).”
Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, background): “The value of tedd ≈ 500 days inferred by the time at which the beamed X-ray emission shut off following the jetted TDE Swift J1644+57 (e.g., Zauderer et al. 2013; Tchekhovskoy et al. 2014; Kawashima et al. 2013) appears in line with theoretical expectations.”
The black hole accretion code (2016, background): “The list of scenarios where AMR can have transformative qualities due to the lack of symmetries goes on, the modelling of stardisk interactions [33], star-jet interactions [34], tidal disruption events [35], complex shock geometries [36, 37], and intermittency in driven-turbulence phenomena [38, 39]”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “The prototypical jetted TDE, Swift J1644+57, radiated ∼ 1054 ergs of isotropic X-rays (Bloom et al. 2011; Burrows et al. 2011), while the kinetic energy of the jet responsible for the radio afterglow likewise approached a significant fraction of a solar rest mass ∼ 1052 − 1053 ergs (e.g., Berger et ”