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Hydrodynamical Simulations to Determine the Feeding Rate of Black Holes by the Tidal Disruption of Stars: The Importance of the Impact Parameter and Stellar Structure

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

The disruption of stars by supermassive black holes has been linked to more than a dozen flares in the cores of galaxies out to redshift $z \sim 0.4$. Modeling these flares properly requires a prediction of the rate of mass return to the black hole after a disruption. Through hydrodynamical simulation, we show that aside from the full disruption of a solar mass star at the exact limit where the star is destroyed, the common assumptions used to estimate $\dot{M}(t)$, the rate of mass return to the black hole, are largely invalid. While the analytical approximation to tidal disruption predicts that the least-centrally concentrated stars and the deepest encounters should have more quickly-peaked flares, we find that the most-centrally concentrated stars have the quickest-peaking flares, and the trend between the time of peak and the impact parameter for deeply-penetrating encounters reverses beyond the critical distance at which the star is completely destroyed. We also show that the most-centrally concentrated stars produced a characteristic drop in $\dot{M}(t)$ shortly after peak when a star is only partially disrupted, with the power law index $n$ being as extreme as -4 in the months immediately following the peak of a flare. Additionally, we find that $n$ asymptotes to $\simeq -2.2$ for both low- and high-mass stars for approximately half of all stellar disruptions. Both of these results are significantly steeper than the typically assumed $n = -5/3$. As these precipitous decay rates are only seen for events in which a stellar core survives the disruption, they can be used to determine if an observed tidal disruption flare produced a surviving remnant. These results should be taken into consideration when flares arising from tidal disruptions are modeled. [abridged]

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Are most detected tidal disruption events partial?

astro-ph.HE · 2026-06-22 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

SPH simulations of zero-energy partial TDEs find fallback ~t^{-9/4}, optical luminosities 10^{42-44} erg/s at 10^4 K and radii 10-100 au, indicating many detected TDEs may be partial rather than full.

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