The Impact of Bound Stellar Orbits and General Relativity on the Temporal Behavior of Tidal Disruption Flares

Understand

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.