An eccentric nuclear disk consists of stars moving on apsidally-aligned orbits around a central black hole. The secular gravitational torques that dynamically stabilize these disks can also produce tidal disruption events (TDEs) at very high rates in Newtonian gravity. General relativity, however, is known to quench secular torques via rapid apsidal precession.
Here we show that for a disk to black hole mass ratio $\gtrsim 10^{-3}$, the system is in the full loss cone regime. The magnitude of the torque per orbital period acting on a stellar orbit means that general relativistic precession does not have a major effect on the dynamics. Thus we find that TDE rates from eccentric nuclear disks are not affected by general relativistic precession. Furthermore, we show that orbital elements between successive TDEs from eccentric nuclear disks are correlated, potentially resulting in unique observational signatures.
We present a suite of high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of binaries immersed in circumbinary accretion disks (CBDs). For the first time, we investigate the preferential accretion rate as a function of both eccentricity $e_{\rm b}$ and mass ratio $q_{\rm b}$ in a densely sampled parameter space, finding that when compared with circular binaries, mass ratios grow more efficiently in binaries on moderately eccentric orbits ($0.0 \lesssim e_{\rm b} \lesssim 0.4$), and high eccentricities ($e_{\rm b} \gtrsim 0.6 $) suppress mass ratio growth. We suggest that this non-monotonic preferential a…
A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star wanders close enough to a black hole to be disrupted by its tidal force. The debris of a tidally disrupted star are expected to form an accretion disc around the supermassive black hole. The light curves of these events sometimes show a quasi-periodic modulation of the flux that can be associated with the precession of the accretion disc due to the Lense-Thirring ("frame-dragging") effect. Since the initial star orbit is in general inclined with respect to the black hole spin, this misalignment combined with the Lense-Thirring effect leads to a…
A white dwarf (WD) captured into a high-eccentricity orbit around a massive black hole (MBH) may undergo many pericenter passages before tidal disruption. During these passages, the tidal potential of the MBH excites internal oscillations or waves in the WD, and the dissipation of these oscillations can significantly influence the physical properties of the WD prior to its disruption. We calculate the amplitude of the tidally excited gravity (buoyancy) waves in the WD as a function of the pericenter distance and eccentricity for realistic WD models, under the assumption that these outgoing gra…
Spin precession effects in the phasing formula of eccentric compact binary inspirals up to the second post-Newtonian order
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度马德拉斯理工学院）；Centre for Strings, Gravitation and Cosmology, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度马德拉斯理工学院物理系弦、引力和宇宙学中心）；Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), Northwestern University（西北大学天体物理学交叉探索与研究中心）
After the Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) of a star around a SuperMassive Black Hole (SMBH), if the stellar debris stream rapidly circularizes and forms a compact disk, the TDE emission is expected to peak in the soft X-ray or far Ultra-Violet (UV). The fact that many TDE candidates are observed to peak in the near UV and optical has challenged conventional TDE emission models. By idealizing a disk as a nested sequence of elliptical orbits which communicate adiabatically via pressure forces, and are heated by energy dissipated during the circularization of the nearly parabolic debris streams, we …
We study the dynamics of merging compact binaries near a rotating supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a hierarchical triple configuration. We include various general relativistic effects that couple the inner orbit, the outer orbit and the spin of the SMBH. During the orbital decay due to gravitational radiation, the inner binary can encounter an "apsidal precession resonance" and experience eccentricity excitation. This resonance occurs when the apsidal precession rate of the inner binary matches that of the outer binary, with the precessions driven by both Newtonian interactions and various po…
Detection of disk-jet co-precession in a tidal disruption event
National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；School of Astronomy and Space Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学天文与空间科学学院）；Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海天文台）；Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学物理学院天文学系）；Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所粒子天体物理重点实验室）
Quantifying the impact of relativistic precession on tidal disruption event light curves
Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik（马克斯·普朗克天体物理研究所）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University（查理大学数学与物理学院理论物理研究所）；Department of Physics and Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学物理学系与哥伦比亚天体物理实验室）；Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所计算天体物理中心）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University（普渡大学物理与天文系）；Hamburger Sternwarte, Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学汉堡天文台）；The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Astronomy, AlbaNova, Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学阿尔巴诺瓦天体物理奥斯卡·克莱因中心）
Eccentricity or spin precession? Distinguishing subdominant effects in gravitational-wave data
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge（剑桥大学应用数学与理论物理系）；School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University（蒙纳士大学物理与天文学院）；OzGrav: The ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery（引力波发现ARC卓越中心）；Dipartimento di Fisica “G. Occhialini”, Universitá degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学“G. Oc恰利尼”物理系）；INFN, Sezione di Milano-Bicocca（意大利国家核物理研究所米兰比可卡分部）；School of Physics and Astronomy & Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学物理与天文学院及引力波天文学研究所）；Dipartimento di Fisica, “Sapienza” Università di Roma & Sezione INFN Roma1（罗马智慧大学物理系及意大利国家核物理研究所罗马一分部）
Whether tidal disruption events (TDEs) circularise or accrete directly as a highly eccentric disc is the subject of current research and appears to depend sensitively on the disc thermodynamics. In a previous paper we applied the theory of eccentric discs to TDE discs using an $α-$prescription for the disc stress, which leads to solutions that exhibit extreme, potentially unphysical, behaviour. In this paper we further explore the dynamical vertical structure of highly eccentric discs using alternative stress models that are better motivated by the behaviour of magnetic fields in eccentric dis…
When a star is tidally disrupted by a supermassive black hole (SMBH), the streams of liberated gas form an accretion disk after their return to pericenter. We demonstrate that Lense-Thirring precession in the spacetime around a rotating SMBH can produce significant time evolution of the disk angular momentum vector, due to both the periodic precession of the disk and the nonperiodic, differential precession of the bound debris streams. Jet precession and periodic modulation of disk luminosity are possible consequences. The persistence of the jetted X-ray emission in the Swift J164449.3+573451 …
Eccentric nuclear disks (ENDs) are a type of star cluster in which the stars lie on eccentric, apsidally-aligned orbits in a disk around a central supermassive black hole (SMBH). These disks can produce a high rate of tidal disruption events (TDEs) via secular gravitational torques. Previous studies of ENDs have included stars with only one mass. Here, we present the first study of an eccentric nuclear disk with two stellar species. We show that ENDs show radial mass segregation consistent with previous results from other cluster types. Additionally, ENDs show vertical mass segregation by whic…
We study the mass fallback rate of tidally disrupted stars on marginally bound and unbound orbits around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) by performing three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations with three key parameters: the star is modeled by a polytrope with two different indexes ($n=1.5$ and $3$). The stellar orbital properties are characterized by five orbital eccentricities ranging from $e=0.98$ to $1.02$ and five different penetration factors ranging from $β=1$ to $3$, where $β$ represents the ratio of the tidal disruption to pericenter distance radii. We derive …
Although not nearly as numerous as binaries with two white dwarfs, eccentric neutron star-white dwarf (NS-WD) binaries are important gravitational-wave (GW) sources for the next generation of space-based detectors sensitive to low frequency waves. Here we investigate periastron precession in these sources as a result of general relativistic, tidal, and rotational effects; such precession is expected to be detectable for at least some of the detected binaries of this type. Currently, two eccentric NS-WD binaries are known in the galactic field, PSR J1141-6545 and PSR B2303+46, both of which hav…
Upon entering the tidal sphere of a supermassive black hole, a star is ripped apart by tides and transformed into a stream of debris. The ultimate fate of that debris, and the properties of the bright flare that is produced and observed, depends on a number of parameters, including the energy of the center of mass of the original star. Here we present the results of a set of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations in which a $1~M_\odot $, $γ= 5/3$ polytrope is disrupted by a $10^6 ~M_\odot$ supermassive black hole. Each simulation has a pericenter distance of $r_{\rm p} = r_{\rm t}$ (i.e.,…
Models for tidal disruption events (TDEs) in which a supermassive black hole disrupts a star commonly assume that the highly eccentric streams of bound stellar debris promptly form a circular accretion disk at the pericenter scale. However, recent numerical simulations (Shiokawa et al., 2015) demonstrated that dissipation via hydrodynamical shocks is insufficient to circularize debris, and the flow retains its initial semi-major axis scale throughout the first ~10 orbits of the event. The bolometric peak luminosity of most TDE candidates, a few x 10^{44} erg/s, implies that we observe only ~1%…
Whether tidal disruption events circularise or accrete directly as highly eccentric discs is the subject of current research and appears to depend sensitively on the disc thermodynamics. One aspect of this problem that has not received much attention is that a highly eccentric disc must have a strong, non-hydrostatic variation of the disc scale height around each orbit. As a complement to numerical simulations carried out by other groups, we investigate the dynamical structure of TDE discs using the nonlinear theory of eccentric accretion discs. In particular, we study the variation of physica…
After the Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) of a star around a SuperMassive Black Hole (SMBH), the bound stellar debris rapidly forms an accretion disk. If the accretion disk is not aligned with the spinning SMBH's equatorial plane, the disk will be driven into Lense-Thirring precession around the SMBH's spin axis, possibly affecting the TDE's light curve. We carry out an eigenmode analysis of such a disk to understand how the disk's warp structure, precession, and inclination evolution are influenced by the disk's and SMBH's properties. We find an oscillatory warp may develop as a result of strong…
Bridging Roche Lobe Overflow and micro-TDEs: The Runaway Evolution of Eccentric Mass Transfer in Star-Black Hole Binaries
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao-Tong University（上海交大李政道研究所）；Department of Physics, College of Sciences, Shanghai University（上海大学理学院）；Department of Astronomy, Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Cornell University（康奈尔大学天文学系天体物理学与行星科学中心）
Simultaneous excitation of low-frequency eccentric precessing mode (one-armed p-mode) and tilt mode on tidally deformed disks is considered. If the orbit of the secondary star is eccentric and its orbital plane is misaligned with the disk plane of the primary, the above-mentioned two low-frequency oscillation modes are simultaneously excited on the primary disk, the former having prograte precession and the latter having retrograde precession. This excitation of disk oscillations is due to a wave-wave resonant excitation process considered by Kato (2013). If parameter values relevant to Be/X-r…
Successive Partial Disruptions with Orbital Precession in a White Dwarf-Black Hole System for Repeating GRB 250702B
Astronomical Institute, Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University（东北大学理学研究科天文学研究所）；Department of Astronomy, School of Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学理学部天文学科）
The potential of tidal disruption of stars to probe otherwise quiescent supermassive black holes cannot be exploited, if their dynamics is not fully understood. So far, the observational appearance of these events has been derived from analytical extrapolations of the debris dynamical properties just after disruption. By means of hydrodynamical simulations, we investigate the subsequent fallback of the stream of debris towards the black hole for stars already bound to the black hole on eccentric orbits. We demonstrate that the debris circularize due to relativistic apsidal precession which cau…
Close encounters between stellar-mass black holes (BHs) and stars occur frequently in dense star clusters and in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Recent studies have shown that in highly eccentric close encounters, the star can be tidally disrupted by the BH (micro-tidal disruption event, or micro-TDE), resulting in rapid mass accretion and possibly bright electromagnetic signatures. Here we consider a scenario in which the star might approach the stellar-mass BH in a gradual, nearly circular inspiral, under the influence of dynamical friction on a circum-binary gas disk or three-bo…
Binary stars that are on close orbits around massive black holes (MBH) such as Sgr A* in the center of the Milky Way are liable to undergo tidal disruption and eject a hypervelocity star. We study the interaction between such a MBH and circular binaries for general binary orientations and penetration depths (i.e. binaries penetrate into the tidal radius around the BH). We show that for very deep penetrators, all binaries are disrupted when the binary rotation axis is roughly oriented toward the BH or it is in the opposite direction. The surviving chance becomes significant when the angle betwe…
We study tidal disruption and subsequent mass fallback for stars approaching supermassive black holes on bound orbits, by performing three dimensional Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations with a pseudo-Newtonian potential. We find that the mass fallback rate decays with the expected -5/3 power of time for parabolic orbits, albeit with a slight deviation due to the self-gravity of the stellar debris. For eccentric orbits, however, there is a critical value of the orbital eccentricity, significantly below which all of the stellar debris is bound to the supermassive black hole. All the mas…
We study the rates of tidal disruption of stars by intermediate-mass to supermassive black holes on bound to unbound orbits by using high-accuracy direct N-body experiments. The approaching stars from the star cluster to the black hole can take three types of orbit: eccentric, parabolic, and hyperbolic orbits. Since the mass fallback rate shows a different variability depending on these orbital types, we can classify tidal disruption events (TDEs) into three main categories: eccentric, parabolic, and hyperbolic TDEs. Respective TDEs are characterized by two critical values of the orbital eccen…
In this paper, we derive a set of equations of motions for binaries on eccentric orbits undergoing spin-induced precession that can efficiently be integrated on the radiation-reaction timescale. We find a family of solutions with a computation cost improved by a factor $10$ - $50$ down to $\sim 10$ ms per waveform evaluation compared to waveforms obtained by directly integrating the precession equations, that maintain a mismatch of the order $10^{-4}$ - $10^{-6}$ for waveforms lasting a million orbital cycles and a thousand spin-induced precession cycles. We express it in terms of parameters t…
We describe a new kind of resonance occuring in relativistic three-body hierarchical systems: the precession resonance, occuring when the relativistic precession timescale of a binary equals the period of a distant perturber. We find that, contrary to what most previous studies assume, it can lead to an exponential increase of eccentricity of the binary even when relativistic precession dominates the quadrupolar perturbation. The resonance may happen in the observation band of LISA or change the eccentricity distribution of triples. We discuss the physics of the resonance, showing that it main…
Ultralight bosons can be abundantly produced through superradiance process by a spinning black hole and form a bound state with hydrogen-like spectrum. We show that such a "gravitational atom" typically possesses anomalously large mass quadrupole and leads to significant orbital precession when it forms an eccentric binary with a second compact object. Dynamically formed black hole binaries or pulsar-black hole binaries are typically eccentric during their early inspirals. We show that the large orbital precession can generate distinct and observable signature in their gravitational wave or pu…
Orbital eccentricity in a neutron star - black hole merger
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Instituto de Física Teórica UAM/CSIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学理论物理研究所(UAM/CSIC)）；Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)（马克斯·普朗克引力物理学研究所(爱因斯坦研究所)）
Hydrodynamical simulations show that circumbinary disks become eccentric, even when the binary is circular. Here we demonstrate that, in steady state, the disk's eccentricity behaves as a long-lived free mode trapped by turning points that naturally arise from a continuously truncated density profile. Consequently, both the disk's precession rate and eccentricity profile may be calculated via the simple linear theory for perturbed pressure-supported disks. By formulating and solving the linear theory we find that (i) surprisingly, the precession rate is roughly determined by the binary's quadr…
We have carried out general relativistic particle simulations of stars tidally disrupted by massive black holes. When a star is disrupted in a bound orbit with moderate eccentricity instead of a parabolic orbit, the temporal behavior of the resulting stellar debris changes qualitatively. The debris is initially all bound, returning to pericenter in a short time ~ the original stellar orbital timescale. The resulting fallback rate can thus be much higher than the Eddington rate. Furthermore if the star is disrupted close to the hole, in a regime where general relativity is important, the stella…
Galactic center black holes appear to be nearly universally surrounded by dense stellar clusters. When these black holes go through an active accretion phase, the multiple components of the accretion disk, stellar cluster, and black hole system all coexist. We analyze the effect of drag forces on highly eccentric stellar orbits incurred as stars puncture through the disk plane. Disk crossings dissipate orbital energy, drawing eccentric stars into more circular orbits. For high surface density disks, such as those found around black holes accreting near the Eddington mass accretion limit, the m…
Recently, a 16-day periodicity in one fast radio burst is reported. We propose that this 16-day periodicity may be due to forced precession of the neutron star by a fallback disk. When the rotation axis is misaligned with the normal direction of the disk plane, the neutron star will precess. The eccentricity of the neutron star may be due to rotation or strong magnetic field etc. We found that the 16-day period may be understood using typical masses of the fallback disk. Polarization observations and information about the neutron star rotation period may help to discriminate different models. …
Tidal disruption events occur when a star passes too close to a massive black hole and it is totally ripped apart by tidal forces. It may also happen that the star is not close enough to the black hole to be totally disrupted and a less dramatic event might happen. If the stellar orbit is bound and highly eccentric, just like some stars in the centre of our own Galaxy, repeated flares should occur. When the star approaches the black hole tidal radius at periastron, matter might be stripped resulting in lower intensity outbursts recurring once every orbital period. We report on Swift observatio…
Black-hole - neutron-star mergers: new numerical-relativity simulations and multipolar effective-one-body model with spin precession and eccentricity
Universitat de les Illes Balears（巴利阿里群岛大学）；Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena（耶拿弗里德里希·席勒大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Biased parameter inference of eccentric, spin-precessing binary black holes
Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（马德拉斯印度理工学院）；Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Tata Institute of Fundamental Research（塔塔基础研究所）
We study the dynamics of a solar-type star orbiting around a black hole binary (BHB) in a nearly coplanar system. We present a novel effect that can prompt a growth and significant oscillations of the eccentricity of the stellar orbit when the system encounters an "apsidal precession resonance", where the apsidal precession rate of the outer stellar orbit matches that of the inner BHB. The eccentricity excitation requires the inner binary to have a non-zero eccentricity and unequal masses, and can be created even in non-coplanar triples. We show that the secular variability of the stellar orbi…
We use the general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics code \verb=KORAL= to simulate the early stages of accretion disk formation resulting from the tidal disruption of a solar mass star around a super massive black hole (BH) of mass $10^6\,M_\odot$. We simulate the disruption of artificially more bound stars with orbital eccentricity $e\leq0.99$ (compared to the more realistic case of parabolic orbits with $e=1$) on close orbits with impact parameter $β\geq3$. We use a novel method of injecting the tidal stream into the domain. For two simulations, we choose $e=0.99$ and inject mass a…
Electromagnetic alignment and jet precession around supermassive black holes: Quasi-periodic oscillations in tidal disruption events
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics（马克斯·普朗克地外物理研究所）；The Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics（卡弗里天文学与天体物理研究所）；Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications（北京数学与应用科学研究所有限公司）；Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Peking University（北京大学物理学院天文学系）
Toward a complete understanding of the properties of GW190521
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；LIGO Laboratory（LIGO实验室）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
We investigate interactions of stellar binaries in galactic nuclear clusters with a massive black hole (MBH). We consider binaries on highly eccentric orbits around the MBH that change due to random gravitational interactions with other stars in the nuclear stellar cluster. The pericenters of the orbits perform a random walk, and we consider cases where this random walk slowly brings the binary to the Hills tidal separation radius (the so-called empty loss-cone regime). However, we find that in a majority of cases the expected separation does not occur and instead the members of the binary mer…
We perform 3D general relativistic smoothed particle hydrodynamics (GRSPH) simulations of tidal disruption events involving 1 $M_\odot$ stars and $10^6 M_\odot$ rotating supermassive black holes. We consider stars on initially elliptical orbits both in, and inclined to, the black hole equatorial plane. We confirm that stream-stream collisions caused by relativistic apsidal precession rapidly circularise the disrupted material into a disc. For inclined trajectories we find that nodal precession induced by the black hole spin (i.e. Lense-Thirring precession) inhibits stream-stream collisions onl…
