Consequences of Strong Compression in Tidal Disruption Events

Understand

The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) is a highly energetic event with consequences dependent on the degree to which the star plunges inside the SMBH's tidal sphere.

• We introduce a new analytic model for tidal disruption events (TDEs) to analyze the dependence of these events on beta, the ratio of the tidal radius to the orbital pericenter.
• We find, contrary to most previous work, that the spread in debris energy for a TDE is largely constant for all beta.
• This result has important consequences for optical transient searches targeting TDEs, which we discuss.