General Relativistic Hydrodynamic Simulation of Accretion Flow from a Stellar Tidal Disruption

Understand

We study how the matter dispersed when a supermassive black hole tidally disrupts a star joins an accretion flow.

• Combining a relativistic hydrodynamic simulation of the stellar disruption with a relativistic hydrodynamics simulation of the tidal debris motion, we track such a system until ~80% of the stellar mass bound to the black hole has settled into an accretion flow.
• Shocks near the stellar pericenter and also near the apocenter of the most tightly-bound debris dissipate orbital energy, but only enough to make the characteristic radius comparable to the semi-major axis of the most-bound material, not the tidal radius as previously thought.
• The outer shocks are caused by post-Newtonian effects, both on the stellar orbit during its disruption and on the tidal forces.