Bandopadhyay, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-5116-844X, Fancher, J. orcid.org/0009-0008-5847-9778, Athian, A. et al. (7 more authors) (2024) The Peak of the Fallback Rate from Tidal Disruption Events: Dependence on Stellar Type. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 961 (1). L2. ISSN 2041-8205
Abstract
A star completely destroyed in a tidal disruption event (TDE) ignites a luminous flare that is powered by the fallback of tidally stripped debris to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) of mass M•. We analyze two estimates for the peak fallback rate in a TDE, one being the “frozen-in” model, which predicts a strong dependence of the time to peak fallback rate, tpeak, on both stellar mass and age, with 15 days ≲ tpeak ≲ 10 yr for main sequence stars with masses 0.2 ≤ M⋆/M⊙ ≤ 5 and M• = 106M⊙. The second estimate, which postulates that the star is completely destroyed when tides dominate the maximum stellar self-gravity, predicts that tpeak is very weakly dependent on stellar type, with t MM peak • = (23.2 +4.0 days) (M./10 6M⊙) 1/2 for 0.2 ≤ M⋆/M⊙ ≤ 5, while tpeak = (29.8 +3.6 days) (M./10 6M⊙) 1/2 for a Kroupa initial mass function truncated at 1.5M⊙. This second estimate also agrees closely with hydrodynamical simulations, while the frozen-in model is discrepant by orders of magnitude. We conclude that (1) the time to peak luminosity in complete TDEs is almost exclusively determined by SMBH mass, and (2) massive-star TDEs power the largest accretion luminosities. Consequently, (a) decades-long extra-galactic outbursts cannot be powered by complete TDEs, including massive-star disruptions, and (b) the most highly super-Eddington TDEs are powered by the complete disruption of massive stars, which—if responsible for producing jetted TDEs—would explain the rarity of jetted TDEs and their preference for young and star-forming host galaxies.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Astrophysics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 31 Jan 2024 16:01 |
Last Modified: | 31 Jan 2024 16:01 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Astronomical Society |
Identification Number: | 10.3847/2041-8213/ad0388 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:208448 |