Speaker
Description
Unlucky stars that venture too close to a supermassive black hole (BH) get ripped apart by gravitational tidal forces. These tidal disruption events (TDEs) offer a rare probe of otherwise quiescent BHs.
TDEs are usually detected in the optical and ultraviolet (UV), where light curves show an early-time peak, often followed by a late-time plateau. Recent modelling shows that these plateaus arise when the stellar debris steadily accretes onto the BH, whereas the emission mechanism behind the peak luminosity is largely unknown. However, since TDEs are detected by their bright peak rather than their faint plateau, the peak emission mechanism must be understood to fully exploit the potential of TDEs to infer BH properties.
I present a correlation between the near-UV peak and plateau luminosities from the most recent dataset of 48 TDEs, which we have used to phenomenologically infer peak emission properties. In particular, we have investigated whether the poorly understood peak luminosity has a mutual parameter dependence with the well-modelled plateau luminosity, such as BH mass, inclination angle or stellar mass.
We conclude that a power-law relation between the optical/UV peak luminosity and BH mass can explain the correlation observed between the peak and plateau luminosity. Moreover, we find evidence that the peak luminosity depends on additional parameters, such as the viewing angle or the stellar mass. These findings rule out a subclass of models for optical/UV peak emission in TDEs.
| Talk category | data science (contact d.huppenkothen@uva.nl) |
|---|---|
| Preference for a talk or poster | Talk |
