Numerical study of the tidal interaction of a star and a massive black hole

Abstract

We present a formalism well adapted to the numerical study of the encounter of an ordinary main sequence star with a massive black hole. Symmetry considerations, the use of a well adapted moving grid and a well adapted moving frame along with integration of the partial differential equations by means of pseudo-spectral methods result in a very powerful and accurate tool. The hydrodynamical equations are written in a moving frame which mimics the bulk of the movement of the fluid, resulting in very small relative velocities and a well suited spatial resolution throughout the calculations. Therefore, the numerical calculations are considerably simplified, smoothing in particular the Courant condition. Typical runs are performed within a few hours on a workstation with the high accuracy linked to the spectral methods. Predictions of the so-called affine are tested against this full numerical simulation.

11 pages, 9 PostScript figures (available as uuencoded compressed tar file), uses epsfig.tex, l-aa.sty (LaTeX style file for Astronomy & Astrophysics, vers. 3.0). Accepted on April 1995 for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Adding figure 1

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