No Arabic abstract
Capture and tidal disruption of stars by the supermassive black hole in the Galactic center (GC) should occur regularly. The energy released and dissipated by this processes will affect both the ambient environment of the GC and the Galactic halo. A single star of super-Eddington eruption generates a subsonic out ow with an energy release of more than $10^{52}$ erg, which still is not high enough to push shock heated gas into the halo. Only routine tidal disruption of stars near the GC can provide enough cumulative energy to form and maintain large scale structures like the Fermi Bubbles. The average rate of disruption events is expected to be $10^{-4}$ ~ $10^{-5}$ yr$^{-1}$, providing the average power of energy release from the GC into the halo of dW/dt ~ 3*10$^{41}$ erg/s, which is needed to support the Fermi Bubbles. The GC black hole is surrounded by molecular clouds in the disk, but their overall mass and filling factor is too low to stall the shocks from tidal disruption events significantly. The de facto continuous energy injection on timescales of Myr will lead to the propagation of strong shocks in a density stratified Galactic halo and thus create elongated bubble-like features, which are symmetric to the Galactic midplane.
The concept of stars being tidally ripped apart and consumed by a massive black hole (MBH) lurking in the center of a galaxy first captivated theorists in the late 1970s. The observational evidence for these rare but illuminating phenomena for probing otherwise dormant MBHs, first emerged in archival searches of the soft X-ray ROSAT All-Sky Survey in the 1990s; but has recently accelerated with the increasing survey power in the optical time domain, with tidal disruption events (TDEs) now regarded as a class of optical nuclear transients with distinct spectroscopic features. Multiwavelength observations of TDEs have revealed panchromatic emission, probing a wide range of scales, from the innermost regions of the accretion flow, to the surrounding circumnuclear medium. I review the current census of 56 TDEs reported in the literature, and their observed properties can be summarized as follows: $bullet$ The optical light curves follow a power-law decline from peak that scales with the inferred central black hole mass as expected for the fallback rate of the stellar debris, but the rise time does not. $bullet$ The UV/optical and soft X-ray thermal emission come from different spatial scales, and their intensity ratio has a large dynamic range, and is highly variable, providing important clues as to what is powering the two components. $bullet$ They can be grouped into three spectral classes, and those with Bowen fluorescence line emission show a preference for a hotter and more compact line-emitting region, while those with only He II emission lines are the rarest class.
Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can act as black hole assembly lines, funneling some of the stellar-mass black holes from the vicinity of the galactic center into the inner plane of the AGN disk where the black holes can merge through dynamical friction and gravitational wave emission. Here, we show that stars near the galactic center are also brought into the AGN disk, where they can be tidally disrupted by the stellar-mass black holes in the disk. Such micro-tidal disruption events (micro-TDEs) could be useful probe of stellar interaction with the AGN disk. We find that micro-TDEs in AGNs occur at a rate of $sim170$ Gpc$^{-3}$yr$^{-1}$. Their cleanest observational probe may be the detection of tidal disruption in AGNs by heavy supermassive black holes ($M_{bullet}gtrsim10^{8}$ M$_{odot}$) so that cannot tidally disrupt solar-type stars. We discuss two such TDE candidates observed to date (ASASSN-15lh and ZTF19aailpwl).
Stream-stream collisions play an important role for the circularization of highly eccentric streams resulting from tidal disruption events (TDEs). We perform three dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations to show that stream collisions can contribute significant optical and ultraviolet light to the flares produced by TDEs, and can sometimes explain the majority of the observed emission. Our simulations focus on the region near the radiation pressure dominated shock produced by a collision and track how the kinetic energy of the stream is dissipated by the associated shock. When the mass flow rate of the stream $dot{M}$ is a significant fraction of the Eddington accretion rate, $gtrsim2%$ of the initial kinetic energy is converted to radiation directly as a result of the collision. In this regime, the collision redistributes the specific kinetic energy into the downstream gas and more than $16%$ of the mass can become unbound. The fraction of unbound gas decreases rapidly as $dot{M}$ drops significantly below the Eddington limit, with no unbound gas being produced when $dot{M}$ drops to $1%$ of Eddington; we find however that the radiative efficiency increases slightly to $lesssim 8%$ in these low $dot{M}$ cases. The effective radiation temperature and size of the photosphere is determined by the stream velocity and $dot{M}$, which we find to be a few times $10^4$~K and $10^{14}$~cm in our calculations, comparable to the inferred values of some TDE candidates. The photosphere size is directly proportional to $dot{M}$, which can explain the rapidly changing photosphere sizes seen in TDE candidates such as PS1-10jh.
Numerical simulations have historically played a major role in understanding the hydrodynamics of the tidal disruption process. Given the complexity of the geometry of the system, the challenges posed by the problem have indeed stimulated much work on the numerical side. Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics methods, for example, have seen their very first applications in the context of tidal disruption and still play a major role to this day. Likewise, initial attempts at simulating the evolution of the disrupted star with the so-called affine method have been historically very useful. In this Chapter, we provide an overview of the numerical techniques used in the field and of their limitations, and summarize the work that has been done to simulate numerically the tidal disruption process.
Recent studies of Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) have revealed unexpected correlations between the TDE rate and the large-scale properties of the host galaxies. In this review, we present the host galaxy properties of all TDE candidates known to date and quantify their distributions. We consider throughout the differences between observationally-identified types of TDEs and differences from spectroscopic control samples of galaxies. We focus here on the black hole and stellar masses of TDE host galaxies, their star formation histories and stellar populations, the concentration and morphology of the optical light, the presence of AGN activity, and the extra-galactic environment of the TDE hosts. We summarize the state of several possible explanations for the links between the TDE rate and host galaxy type. We present estimates of the TDE rate for different host galaxy types and quantify the degree to which rate enhancement in some types results in rate suppression in others. We discuss the possibilities for using TDE host galaxies to assist in identifying TDEs in upcoming large transient surveys and possibilities for TDE observations to be used to study their host galaxies.