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Title: Tidal disruption discs formed and fed by stream–stream and stream–disc interactions in global GRHD simulations

Journal Article · · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
 [1];  [2];  [3]; ORCiD logo [4]; ORCiD logo [5]
  1. Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States); Evanston Township High School, IL (United States); Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
  2. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States); Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, Amsterdam (Netherlands); Univ. of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
  3. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
  4. Syracuse Univ., NY (United States); Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
  5. Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem (Israel). Racah Inst. of Physics; Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States); Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)

When a star passes close to a supermassive black hole (BH), the BH’s tidal forces rip it apart into a thin stream, leading to a tidal disruption event (TDE). In this work, we study the post-disruption phase of TDEs in general relativistic hydrodynamics (GRHD) using our GPU-accelerated code h-amr. We carry out the first grid-based simulation of a deep-penetration TDE (β = 7) with realistic system parameters: a black hole-to-star mass ratio of 106, a parabolic stellar trajectory, and a non-zero BH spin. We also carry out a simulation of a tilted TDE whose stellar orbit is inclined relative to the BH midplane. We show that for our aligned TDE, an accretion disc forms due to the dissipation of orbital energy with ~20 percent of the infalling material reaching the BH. The dissipation is initially dominated by violent self-intersections and later by stream–disc interactions near the pericentre. The self-intersections completely disrupt the incoming stream, resulting in five distinct self-intersection events separated by approximately 12 h and a flaring in the accretion rate. We also find that the disc is eccentric with mean eccentricity e ≈ 0.88. For our tilted TDE, we find only partial self-intersections due to nodal precession near pericentre. Although these partial intersections eject gas out of the orbital plane, an accretion disc still forms with a similar accreted fraction of the material to the aligned case. These results have important implications for disc formation in realistic tidal disruptions. For instance, the periodicity in accretion rate induced by the complete stream disruption may explain the flaring events from Swift J1644+57.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Israel Science Foundation
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725; 1615281; OAC-1811605; OCI-0725070; ACI-1238993; HST-HF2-51433.001; NAS5-26555; NNX17AK43G; 2565/19
OSTI ID:
1982564
Journal Information:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 510, Issue 2; ISSN 0035-8711
Publisher:
Oxford University PressCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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