Weighing Black Holes using Tidal Disruption Events

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model for analyzing tidal disruption events (TDEs) using simulations and observational data, providing insights into black hole masses and stellar populations involved.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel TDE modeling module integrated with MOSFiT, enabling systematic comparison of simulations with observations to estimate black hole and stellar properties.

Findings

No significant viscous delays exceeding a few days were observed.

Black hole masses are estimated to be between 10^6 and 10^8 solar masses.

Results support the prevalence of low-mass stars in TDEs.

Abstract

While once rare, observations of stars being tidally disrupted by supermassive black holes are quickly becoming commonplace. To continue to learn from these events it is necessary to robustly and systematically compare our growing number of observations with theory. We present a tidal disruption module for the Modular Open Source Fitter for Transients (MOSFiT) and the results from fitting 14 tidal disruption events (TDEs). Our model uses FLASH simulations of TDEs to generate bolometric luminosities and passes these luminosities through viscosity and reprocessing transformation functions to create multi-wavelength light curves. It then uses an MCMC fitting routine to compare these theoretical light curves with observations. We find that none of the events show evidence for viscous delays exceeding a few days, supporting the theory that our current observing strategies in the optical/UV are missing a significant number of viscously delayed flares. We find that the events have black hole masses of $10^6 - 10^8 M_{\odot}$, and that the masses we predict are as reliable as those based on bulk galaxy properties. We also find that there is a preference for stars with mass $< 1 M_{\odot}$, as expected when low-mass stars greatly outnumber high-mass stars.