2026ApJ..1000....9C

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.