Stars approaching supermassive black holes can be tidally disrupted. Despite being expected to emit X-rays, TDEs have been largely observed in optical bands, which is poorly understood. In this Letter, we simulate the tidal disruption of a 1M⊙ main sequence star on an eccentric (e=0.95) orbit with a periapsis distance one or five times smaller than the tidal radius (β=1 or 5) using general relativistic smoothed particle hydrodynamics. We follow the simulation for up to a year post-disruption. We show that accretion disks in eccentric TDEs are masked by unbound material outflowing at ∼10,000km/s. Assuming electron scattering opacity, this material would be visible as a ∼100au photosphere at ∼104K, in line with observations of candidate TDEs.
@article{arxiv.2312.03210,
title = {Optical Appearance of Eccentric Tidal Disruption Events},
author = {Fangyi and Hu and Daniel J. Price and Ilya Mandel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.03210},
year = {2024}
}