A Unified Model for Tidal Disruption Events

By L. Dai, J. McKinney, Nathaniel Roth, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, M. Miller. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the past few years wide-field optical and UV transient surveys and X-ray telescopes have allowed us to identify a few dozen candidate tidal disruption events (TDEs). While in theory the physical processes in TDEs are ubiquitous, a few distinct classes of TDEs have been observed. Some TDEs radiate mainly in NUV/optical, while others produce prominent X-rays. Moreover, relativistic jets have been observed in only a handful of TDEs. This diversity might be related to the details of the super-Eddington accretion and emission physics relevant to TDE disks. In this Letter, we utilize novel three-dimensional general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations to study the super-Eddington compact disk phase expected in TDEs. Consistent with previous studies, geometrically thick disks, wide-angle optically thick fast outflows, and relativistic jets are produced. The outflow density and velocity depend sensitively on the inclination angle, and hence so does the reprocessing of emission produced from the inner disk. We then use Monte Carlo radiative transfer to calculate the reprocessed spectra and find that that the observed ratio of optical to X-ray fluxes increases with increasing inclination angle. This naturally leads to a unified model for different classes of TDEs in which the spectral properties of the TDE depend mainly on the viewing angle of the observer with respect to the orientation of the disk.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f49ead5fe2006dbbdd605cad097c1fb535dd0883

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. E. Berger
3. Bing Zhang
4. Masaomi Tanaka
5. E. Ramirez-Ruiz
6. Nozomu Tominaga
7. D. Perley
8. K. Maeda

In Instrumentation

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

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Nozomu Tominaga
2. K. Maeda
3. P. Mazzali
4. B. Mockler
5. E. Ramirez-Ruiz
6. J. Sollerman
7. S. Dhawan
8. Joshua S. Bloom

Citations in the corpus

• The fast, luminous ultraviolet transient AT2018cow: extreme supernova, or disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole? (2018, background): “Alternatively, it is possible that the early UV/optical emission is related to the circularization process (Piran et al. 2015; Dai et al. 2018), rather than accretion.”
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, background): “Outflows and winds have been proposed as the origin of this emission (Metzger & Stone 2016; Dai et al. 2018), as have shocks from the intersecting debris streams (Piran et al. 2015; Jiang et al. 2016).”