Journal article
Evidence for the Preferential Disruption of Moderately Massive Stars by Supermassive Black Holes
B Mockler, AA Twum, K Auchettl, S Dodd, KD French, JAP Law-Smith, E Ramirez-Ruiz
Astrophysical Journal | IOP Publishing Ltd | Published : 2022
Abstract
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide a unique opportunity to probe the stellar populations around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). By combining light-curve modeling with spectral line information and knowledge about the stellar populations in the host galaxies, we are able to constrain the properties of the disrupted star for three TDEs. The TDEs in our sample have UV spectra, and measurements of the UV N iii to C iii line ratios enabled estimates of the nitrogen-to-carbon abundance ratios for these events. We show that the measured nitrogen line widths are consistent with originating from the disrupted stellar material dispersed by the central SMBH. We find that these nitrogen-to-carbon ..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Tiara Hung, Giorgos Leloudas, Nadia Blagorodnova and John Brown for their helpful collaboration on this work. We thank the anonymous referee for constructive corrections and suggestions. B.M. is grateful for the AAUW American Fellowship, and the UCSC Presidents Dissertation Fellowship. A.A.T., E.R.-R., and B.M. are grateful for support from the Packard Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, NSF (AST-1615881, AST-1911206 and AST-1852393), Swift (80NSSC21K1409, 80NSSC19K1391), and Chandra (GO920122X). K.A. is grateful for support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. The calculations for this research were carried out in part on the UCSC Hyades supercomputer (supported by NSF award AST-1229745 and by UCSC), and in part on the UCSC lux supercomputer (supported by NSF MRI grant AST1828315).