1997/10/24 by Kevin P. Rauch, K. P. Rauch, Brian Ingalls +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Angular momentum #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black hole (networking) #Galaxy #Numerical integration #Scaling #Series (stratigraphy) #Star cluster #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Supermassive black hole #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1998.01889.x
27 page AASTeX source (3 figures)
arxiv created 1997/10/24 · openalex publication_date 1998/10/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
It has recently been shown by Rauch 38 Tremaine that the rate of angular momentum relaxation in nearly Keplerian star clusters is greatly increased by a process termed ‘resonant relaxation’; it was also argued, via a series of scaling arguments, that tidal disruption of stars in galactic nuclei containing massive black holes could be noticeably enhanced by this process. We describe here the results of numerical simulations of resonant tidal disruption which quantitatively test the predictions made by Rauch 38 Tremaine. The simulation method is based on an N-body routine incorporating cloning of stars near the loss cone and a semirelativistic symplectic integration scheme. Normalized disruption rates for resonant and non-resonant nuclei are derived at orbital energies both above and below the critical energy, and the corresponding angular momentum distribution functions are found. The black hole mass above which resonant tidal disruption is quenched by relativistic precession is determined. We also briefly describe the discovery of chaos in the Wisdom—Holman symplectic integrator applied to highly eccentric orbits and propose a modified integration scheme that remains robust under these conditions. We find that resonant disruption rates exceed their non-resonant counterparts by an amount consistent with the predictions; in particular, we estimate the net tidal disruption rate for a fully resonant cluster to be about twice that of its non-resonant counterpart. No significant enhancement in rates is observed outside the critical radius. Relativistic quenching of the effect is found to occur for hole masses M> MQ = (8 ± 3) × 107M. The numerical results combined with the observed properties of galactic nuclei indicate that for most galaxies the resonant enhancement to tidal disruption rates will be very small.