Tidal Disruption Events

Revisiting Optical Tidal Disruption Events with iPTF16axa

We report the discovery by the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) of a candidate tidal disruption event (TDE) iPTF16axa at z = 0.108, and present its broadband photometric and spectroscopic evolution from 3 months of follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and Swift. The light curve is well fitted with a t decay, and we constrain the rise-time to peak to be <49 rest-frame...

Evolution of Thick Accretion Disks Produced by Tidal Disruption Events

Geometrically thick disks may form after tidal disruption events, and rapid accretion may lead to short flares followed by long-term, lower-level emission. Using a novel accretion disk code which relies primarily on global conservation laws and the assumption that viscosity is everywhere positive, a broad range of physically allowed evolutionary sequences of thick disks is investigated. The mai...

The γ-ray afterglows of tidal disruption events

A star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) will be tidally disrupted. Previous studies of such 'tidal disruption event' (TDE) mostly focus on the stellar debris that are bound to the system, because they give rise to luminous flares. On the other hand, half of the stellar debris in principle are unbound and can stream to a great distance, but so far there is no clear evidenc...

The Evolutionary Pathways of Tidal Disruption Events: from Stars to Debris Streams, Accretion Disks, and Relativistic Jets

Enhanced Tidal Disruption Rates from Massive Black Hole Binaries

“Hard” massive black hole (MBH) binaries embedded in steep stellar cusps can shrink via threebody slingshot interactions. We show that this process will inevitably be accompanied by a burst of stellar tidal disruptions, at a rate that can be several orders of magnitude larger than that appropriate for a single MBH. Our numerical scattering experiments reveal that: 1) a significant fraction of s...