Early spectroscopic evolution of tidal disruption events
PI:
Tzu-Yu Hung
Co-I(s):
Nadia Blagorodnova, Jonathan Brown, Sjoert van Velzen, Lixin Dai, Nathaniel Roth, Suvi Gezari, Ryan Foley, Charles Kilpatrick, Cesar Rojas-Bravo, Stephen Cenko
Abstract
2018 marks the beginning of a golden era of transient sky surveys: the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) commenced operation and the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) will soon follow. Capitalizing on the wide areal coverage of these surveys, the time is ripe for studying the early science of tidal disruption events (TDEs) -- rare transient events that occur when stars approach too close to supermassive black holes (SMBH) and are ripped apart by tidal stress. Early time evolution in the optical spectroscopic signatures of TDEs contains vital information about the kinematics and physical conditions of the fall-back stellar material, a topic that has rarely been probed before. Building upon work on physically driven models for TDE emission lines, our goal is to obtain high quality TDE spectra spanning the crucial period before and after peak light to robustly test theoretical models. These efforts are critical to constraining the power source of UV and optical emission in TDEs, which in turn provide insight into two competing processes -- accretion and circularization.