Gravitational waves from tidal disruption events: an open and comprehensive catalogue

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extensive online library of gravitational waveforms from tidal disruption events, generated via advanced simulations, aiding future research and detection efforts in gravitational wave astronomy.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive, open-access catalogue of gravitational waveforms from TDEs, created with a new simulation feature in a relativistic hydrodynamics code.

Findings

Waveforms match theoretical predictions for benchmark scenarios.

Parameter variations significantly influence gravitational wave signals.

The catalogue is publicly available and designed to evolve with ongoing research.

Abstract

We present an online, open and comprehensive template library of gravitational waveforms produced during the tidal disruptions of stars by massive black holes, spanning a broad space of parameters. We build this library thanks to a new feature that we implement in the general relativistic version of PHANTOM, a smoothed particle hydrodynamics code for three dimensional simulations in general relativity. We first perform a series of numerical tests to show that the gravitational wave (GW) signal obtained is in excellent agreement with the one expected from theory. This benchmark is done for well studied scenarios (such as binary stellar systems). We then apply our code to calculate the GW signals from tidal disruption events (TDEs), finding that our results are consistent with the theoretical estimates obtained in previous studies for selected parameters. We illustrate interesting results from the catalogue, where we stress how the gravitational signal is affected by variations of some parameters (like black hole spin, stellar orbital eccentricity and inclination). The full catalogue is available online. It is intended to be a living catalogue.