Insights into Tidal Disruption of Stars from PS1-10jh

Understand

Was PS1-10jh (Gezari et al.

• 2012), an optical/UV transient discovered by the Pan-STARRS Medium Deep Survey, the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole? We address two aspects of the problem: the composition of the putative disrupted object (using the spectroscopic data), and the energetics of the observed gas and radiation (using the photometric data).
• We perform photoionization calculations and compare with the observed lower limit of the line ratio L(He II 4686)/L(Halpha) > 5 to argue that this event was not the disruption of a solar-type star, and instead was likely the disruption of a helium core (as first proposed by Gezari et al.
• 2012).