Fitting optical light curves of Tidal Disruption Events with TiDE

TL;DR

This paper introduces TiDE, a new code for modeling optical light curves of Tidal Disruption Events, and compares its performance with existing tools across 20 observed TDEs.

Contribution

The paper presents TiDE, a novel, publicly available code for fitting TDE light curves, and provides a comparative analysis with MOSFiT and TDEmass.

Findings

TiDE successfully fits 20 TDE light curves.

Comparative analysis reveals differences between TiDE, MOSFiT, and TDEmass.

TiDE offers a new, object-oriented approach to TDE light curve modeling.

Abstract

A Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) occurs when a supermassive black hole tidally disrupt a nearby passing star. The fallback accretion rate of the disrupted star may exceed the Eddington limit, which induces a supersonic outflow and a burst of luminosity, similar to an explosive event. Thus, TDEs can be detected as very luminous transients, and the number of observations for such events is increasing rapidly. In this paper we fit 20 TDE light curves with TiDE, a new public, object-oriented code designed to model optical TDE light curves. We compare our results with those obtained by the popular MOSFiT and the recently developed TDEmass codes, and discuss the possible sources of differences.