"Failed" tidal disruption events and X-ray flares from the Galactic Center
arXiv:1904.02424 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stz981
Abstract
The process of tidal disruption of stars by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) provides luminous UV and soft X-ray flares with peak luminosities of ergs/sec and duration of a few months. As part of a wider exploration of the effects of stellar rotation on the outcome of a TDE, we have performed hydrodynamical simulations of the disruption of a rotating star whose spin axis is opposite to the orbital axis. Such a retrograde rotation makes the star more resilient to tidal disruption, so that, even if its orbit reaches the formal tidal radius, it actually stays intact after the tidal encounter. However, the outer layers of the star are initially stripped away from the core, but then fall back onto the star itself, producing a newly formed accretion disc around the star. We estimate that the accretion rate onto the star would be strongly super-Eddington (for the star) and would result in an X-ray flare with luminosity of the order of ergs/sec and duration of a few months. We speculate that such events might be responsible for the known X-ray flares from Sgr A* in the recent past.
8 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
References in corpus (7)
- Astrophysics Source Code Library
- SPLASH: An interactive visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations
- Stellar disruption by a supermassive black hole: is the light curve really proportional to ?
- Tidal disruption events: the role of stellar spin
- Not that long time ago in the nearest galaxy: 3D slice of molecular gas revealed by a 110 years old flare of Sgr A*
- Papaloizou-Pringle instability suppression by the magnetorotational instability in relativistic accretion discs
- On the Papaloizou-Pringle instability in tidal disruption events