Ultra-Close Encounters of Stars With Massive Black Holes: Tidal Disruption Events With Prompt Hyperaccretion

Understand

A bright flare from a galactic nucleus followed at late times by a $t^{-5/3}$ decay in luminosity is often considered the signature of the complete tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole.

• The flare and power-law decay are produced when the stream of bound debris returns to the black hole, self-intersects, and eventually forms an accretion disk or torus.
• In the canonical scenario of a solar-type star disrupted by a $10^{6}\; M_\odot$ black hole, the time between the disruption of the star and the formation of the accretion torus could be years.
• We present fully general relativistic simulations of a new class of tidal disruption events involving ultra-close encounters of solar-type stars with intermediate mass black holes.