Mass Segregation in Eccentric Nuclear Disks: Enhanced Tidal Disruption Event Rates for High Mass Stars
Public Deposited- Abstract
Eccentric nuclear disks are a type of star cluster found in galaxy nuclei in which the stars lie on highly elliptical, spatially–aligned orbits in a disk around the central supermassive black hole. The closest such disk lies in our nearest large neighbor galaxy, Andromeda. Gravitational interactions between stars stabilize these disks, and can also send stars perilously close to the central black hole. If a star gets close enough, the black hole’s extreme gravity will tear the star apart in a tidal disruption event. These tidal disruption events are observable with Earth–based telescopes, and are of rising interest to astronomers studying high–energy events. Computer simulations of eccentric nuclear disks are a useful tool to constrain how often we might expect to see a tidal disruption event from a galaxy that harbors an eccentric nuclear disk. In an effort to make these simulations more realistic, we conduct the first study of eccentric nuclear disks that considers stars of different masses. We show that more massive stars tend to be found at the inner edge of the disk, on orbits that lie close to the disk’s midplane. These two effects make heavy stars more susceptible to tidal disruption, which manifests as a factor of 2-3 increase in the fraction of heavy stars that disrupt vs. light stars.
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- 2020-04-17
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- 2020-05-07
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mSeg_in_ENDs.pdf | 2020-04-17 | Public | Download |