2026ApJ..1000....9C -
Astrophys. J., 1000, 9 (2026/March-3)
Diverse Emission Patterns from Precessing Super-Eddington Disks Formed in Tidal Disruption Events.
CHEN J.-H., DAI L., KAN C.K., KWAN T.M. and ZHANG Z.
Abstract (from CDS):
A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes within the tidal radius of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). In TDEs, it is expected that the orbital angular momentum of the disrupted star is generally misaligned with the SMBH spin axis, which should result in a misaligned super-Eddington disk precessing around the SMBH spin axis due to the Lense-Thirring effect. In this paper, we investigate the distinct observational signatures produced from such TDE disks by performing radiative transfer calculations upon previous super-Eddington disk simulations. We demonstrate that the precession of the disk and wind drive time-dependent obscuration and reprocessing of X-ray radiation. Depending on the orientation of the viewing angle of the observer and the tilt angle of the disk, four main types of variability are induced. (1) Smooth TDEs: The emissions from these TDEs show no fluctuations. (2) The Dimmer: The main emission type (X-ray or optical) stays the same, with small to moderate modulations of brightness. (3) The Blinker: X-ray and optical emissions take turns to dominate in one cycle of precession, with dramatic changes in the X-ray fluxes. (4) The Siren: X-ray and optical emissions take over each other twice per cycle, possibly with two different peak X-ray fluxes within one cycle. In all three scenarios, we observe an inverse correlation between X-ray and optical emissions. Our model provides a physical framework for interpreting TDE multiwavelength variability through disk precession dynamics and gives an alternative interpretation to the interesting case of J045650.3-203750, which was suggested to be a repeated partial TDE previously.
Abstract Copyright:
© 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
Journal keyword(s):
Hydrodynamical simulations - Tidal disruption - Black hole physics - Galaxies - Galaxy accretion disks
Simbad objects:
13
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