2018/02/28 by Wenbin Lu, Pawan Kumar · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Accretion disc #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysical jet #Energy budget #Energy flow #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Jet (fluid) #Luminosity #Radiative transfer #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aad54a
12 pages, 3 figures, ApJ accepted. Following the referee's suggestion, we provided further arguments (in section 3) that the missing energy puzzle cannot be solved by partial disruptions where the star only loses << 0.1 solar masses
openalex created_date 2018/02/23 · arxiv created 2018/09/19 · openalex publication_date 2018/09/28 · arxiv updated 2018/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract For the majority of tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates, the observed energy in the optical/near-UV bands is of order 10 51 erg. We show that this observed energy is smaller than the minimum bolometric energy for the radiative inefficient accretion flow model by a factor of 10–100. We argue that this discrepancy is because the majority of the energy released is in the extreme-UV (EUV) band and/or in the form of relativistic jets beamed away from the Earth. The EUV scenario is supported by existing mid-infrared data and should be further tested by future dust reverberation observations. The jet scenario is disfavored by radio observations of ASASSN-14li but may still be viable for other TDE candidates. We also provide evidence that, at least for some TDEs, most of the missing energy (in the EUV and/or in the form of jets) is released within a few times the orbital period of the most tightly bound material P min , which means (1) the circularization of the fallback stream may occur rapidly and (2) the luminosity of the accretion flow or the jet power may not be capped near the Eddington level when the fallback rate is super-Eddington. For most other TDEs, this energy-release timescale is currently not strongly constrained.