Simulations of Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract

Numerical simulations have historically played a major role in understanding the hydrodynamics of the tidal disruption process. Given the complexity of the geometry of the system, the challenges posed by the problem have indeed stimulated much work on the numerical side. Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics methods, for example, have seen their very first applications in the context of tidal disruption and still play a major role to this day. Likewise, initial attempts at simulating the evolution of the disrupted star with the so-called affine method have been historically very useful. In this Chapter, we provide an overview of the numerical techniques used in the field and of their limitations, and summarize the work that has been done to simulate numerically the tidal disruption process.

Observable gravitational waves from tidal disruption events and their electromagnetic counterpart

“…spin; Kesden 2012). Nonetheless, several recent hydrodynamic codes allow to perform simulations of this problem (see review of Lodato et al 2020), sometimes in a fully general relativistic context (Liptai et al 2019;Ryu et al 2020b,c). Since the evolution of the rate at which ★ Sophie and Tycho Brahe Fellow; pfisterastro@gmail.com † lixindai@hku.hk debris are accreted by the BH can be directly measured in these simulations, the time evolution of the luminosity can be directly mapped to the initial parameters of the TDE, and this idea has been recently exploited to reverse-engineer parameters of observed TDE lightcurves (Mockler et al 2019;Ryu et al 2020a).…”

The Eccentric Nature of Eccentric Tidal Disruption Events

“…Our simulations are performed with the SPH code phantom (Price et al 2018). phantom has been used in previous studies to simulate TDEs (e.g., Coughlin & Nixon 2015;Coughlin & Armitage 2018;Wu et al 2018;Darbha et al 2019;Golightly et al 2019a;Golightly et al 2019b;Liptai et al 2019;Andalman et al 2020;Bonnerot & Lu 2020;Clerici & Gomboc 2020;Lodato et al 2020;Miles et al 2020;Figure 2. Analytic solutions for the mass fallback rate in the frozen-in approximation.…”

Observable gravitational waves from tidal disruption events and their electromagnetic counterpart

“…spin; Kesden 2012). Nonetheless, several recent hydrodynamic codes allow to perform simulations of this problem (see review of Lodato et al 2020), sometimes in a fully general relativistic context (Liptai et al 2019;Ryu et al 2020b). Since the evolution of the rate at which debris are accreted by the BH can be directly measured in these simulations, the time evolution of the luminosity can be directly mapped to the initial parameters of the TDE, and this idea has been recently exploited to reverse-engineer parameters of observed TDE lightcurves (Mockler et al 2019;Ryu et al 2020a).…”