Radiative Emission Mechanisms of Tidal Disruption Events

Understand

We describe how the various outcomes of stellar tidal disruption give rise to observable radiation.

• We separately consider the cases where gas circularizes rapidly into an accretion disc, as well as the case when shocked debris streams provide the observable emission without having fully circularized.
• For the rapid circularization case, we describe how outflows, absorption by reprocessing layers, and Comptonization can cause the observed radiation to depart from that of a bare disc, possibly giving rise to the observed optical/UV emission along with soft X-rays from the disc.
• If, instead, most of the debris follows highly eccentric orbits for a significant time, many properties of the observed optical/UV emission can be explained by the scale of those eccentric orbits and the shocks embedded in the debris flow near orbital apocenter.