2021
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2110.03741
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Starfall: A heavy rain of stars in 'turning on' AGN

B. McKernan,
K. E. S. Ford,
M. Cantiello
et al.

Abstract: As active galactic nuclei (AGN) 'turn on', some stars end up embedded in accretion disks around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) on retrograde orbits. Such stars experience strong headwinds, aerodynamic drag, ablation and orbital evolution on short timescales. Loss of orbital angular momentum in the first โˆผ 0.1 Myr of an AGN leads to a heavy rain of stars ('starfall') into the inner disk and onto the SMBH. A large AGN loss cone (๐œƒ AGN,lc ) can result from binary scatterings in the inner disk and yield tidal d… Show more

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Cited by 6 publications
(12 citation statements)
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“…Tidal disruptions may also occur in active galactic nuclei (e.g. Chan et al 2019Chan et al , 2020McKernan et al 2021), as hinted at by some observations (e.g. Blanchard et al 2017;Liu et al 2018Liu et al , 2020.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 82%
“…Tidal disruptions may also occur in active galactic nuclei (e.g. Chan et al 2019Chan et al , 2020McKernan et al 2021), as hinted at by some observations (e.g. Blanchard et al 2017;Liu et al 2018Liu et al , 2020.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 82%
“…Their model suggests TDEs with mildly-relativistic outflows are likely important contributors to the cosmic neutrino flux, particularly at high energies, and also shows the key role that UV observations play in probing extreme AGN events, touching on AGN ( ยง 9), TDEs ( ยง 10), and multimessenger astrophysics ( ยง 11). Finally, from the theoretical side, McKernan et al (2021) and McKernan et al (in prep. ) discuss how stars embedded in AGN accretion disks can lead to TDEs.…”
Section: Active Galactic Nucleimentioning
confidence: 94%
“…The resulting TDE is super-luminous, since none of the stellar ejecta escapes; rather it collides with AGN disk gas at small disk radii and drives a high accretion rate event. These events should be more luminous than TDEs in quiescent galactic nuclei and have shorter characteristic timescales (McKernan et al 2021).…”
Section: Immortal Star + Smbhmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…There is an AGN loss-cone which results from the scatterings of stars and other objects onto the SMBH (e.g. McKernan et al 2021). If an immortal star is scattered onto, or close enough to, the SMBH, a tidal disruption event (TDE) can occur.…”
Section: Immortal Star + Smbhmentioning
confidence: 99%