Scaling studies of tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes

Alexander Tchekhovskoy, Northwestern University

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Stars approaching supermassive black holes (BHs) can be tidally disrupted, or spaghettified, by BH tidal gravity. A tidal disruption event (TDE) generally leads to a tilted accretion disk, with an axis misaligned relative to BH spin. However, how such a disk forms and how it evolves thereafter is not understood. Using our new GPU (graphics processing unit)-accelerated 3D general relativistic (GR) magnetohydrodynamic code H-AMR, we investigated both of these questions. We carried out the first GR hydrodynamic simulations of typical TDEs, with supermassive BHs disrupting Sun-like stars infalling from large distances. We discovered that as GR-induced precession causes the tidal stream to self-intersect, this can completely disrupt the stream and efficiently form the disk. We showed that our simulated tilted thick accretion disks launched twin magnetized relativistic jets that underwent Lense–Thirring precession together with the disk, demonstrating from first principles for the first time that jet precession can be used to probe strong-field gravity.