Physics
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21730303s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #303.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Physics
Scientific paper
A star that wanders too close to a massive black hole (BH) gets shredded by the BH's tidal gravity. Stellar gas soon falls back to the BH at a rate initially exceeding the Eddington rate, releasing a flare of energy as gas accretes. How often this process occurs is uncertain at present, as is the physics of super-Eddington accretion (which is relevant for BH growth and feedback at high redshift as well). Excitingly, transient surveys like the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), Pan-STARRS and LSST should shed light on these questions soon -- in anticipation, we predict observational properties of tidal flares. Early on, much of the falling-back gas should blow away in a wind, producing luminous optical emission that are likely imprinted with blueshifted UV absorption lines. If the gas shocking close to the BH is unable to reach thermal equilibrium, the emission will instead be hard X-rays with no optical/UV lines. At later times, the gas accretes in a disk; for MBH 105 - 106 Msun, 1-10% of the disk's emission is reprocessed by escaping stellar debris, producing a spectrum of very broad emission lines. We predict detection rates for PTF, Pan-STARRS and LSST, and discuss the substantial challenge of disentangling these events from supernovae. These surveys should significantly improve our knowledge of stellar dynamics in galactic nuclei, the physics of super-Eddington accretion, the demography of IMBHs, and the role of tidal disruption in the growth of massive BHs. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Miller Institute, UC Berkeley, NASA, and the Packard Foundation.
Quataert Eliot
Strubbe Linda
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