Abstract
The discovery of optical/UV (ultraviolet) tidal disruption events (TDEs) was surprising. The expectation was that, upon returning to the pericentre, the stellar-debris stream will form a compact disc that will emit soft X-rays. Indeed, the first TDEs were discovered in this energy band. A common explanation for the optical/UV events is that surrounding optically thick matter reprocesses the disc's X-ray emission and emits it from a large photosphere. If accretion follows the super-Eddington mass infall rate, it would inevitably result in an energetic outflow, providing naturally the reprocessing matter. We describe here a new method to estimate, using the observed luminosity and temperature, the mass and energy of outflows from optical transients. When applying this method to a sample of supernovae, our estimates are consistent with a more detailed hydrodynamic modelling. For the current sample of a few dozen optical TDEs, the observed luminosity and temperature imply outflows that are significantly more massive than typical stellar masses, posing a problem to this common reprocessing picture.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3385-3393 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
Volume | 502 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Apr 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.
Keywords
- radiation mechanisms: thermal
- supernovae: general
- transients: supernovae
- transients: tidal disruption events