English

Pre-peak Emission in Tidal Disruption Events

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-04-30 v1

Abstract

The rising part of a tidal disruption event light curve provides unique insight into early emission and the onset of accretion. Various mechanisms are proposed to explain the pre-peak emission, including shocks from debris interaction and reprocessing of disk emission. We study the pre-peak emission and its influence on the gas circularization by a series of gray radiation hydrodynamic simulations with varying black hole mass. We find that given a super-Eddington fallback rate of 10\dot{M}_{Edd}, the stream-stream collision can occur multiple times and drive strong outflows of up to 9\dot{M}_{Edd}. By dispersing gas to \gtrsim 100rs, the outflow can delay gas circularization and leads to sub-Eddington accretion rates during the first few stream-stream collisions. The stream-stream collision shock and circularization shock can sustain a luminosity of ~10^{44}erg/s for days. The luminosity is generally sub-Eddington and shows a weak correlation with accretion rate at early time. The outflow is optically thick, yielding a reprocessing layer with a size of ~10^{14} cm and photospheric temperature of ~4\times10^{4}K.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.18446,
  title  = {Pre-peak Emission in Tidal Disruption Events},
  author = {Xiaoshan Huang and Shane W. Davis and Yan-fei Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18446},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 Pages, 19 figures, submitted to ApJ, comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:09:20.226Z