Tidal Peeling Events: low-eccentricity tidal disruption of a star by a stellar-mass black hole

Understand

Close encounters between stellar-mass black holes (BHs) and stars occur frequently in dense star clusters and in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs).

• Recent studies have shown that in highly eccentric close encounters, the star can be tidally disrupted by the BH (micro-tidal disruption event, or micro-TDE), resulting in rapid mass accretion and possibly bright electromagnetic signatures.
• Here we consider a scenario in which the star might approach the stellar-mass BH in a gradual, nearly circular inspiral, under the influence of dynamical friction on a circum-binary gas disk or three-body interactions in a star cluster.
• We perform hydro-dynamical simulations of this scenario using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics code PHANTOM.