Morgan MacLeod

The Tidal Disruption of Giant Stars and their Contribution to the Flaring Supermassive Black Hole Population

Sun-like stars are thought to be regularly disrupted by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) within galactic nuclei. Yet, as stars evolve off the main sequence their vulnerability to tidal disruption increases drastically as they develop a bifurcated structure consisting of a dense core and a tenuous envelope. Here we present the first hydrodynamic simulations of the tidal disruption of giant stars and show that the core has a substantial influence on the stars ability to survive the encounter. Stars with more massive cores retain large fractions of their envelope mass, even in deep encounters. Accretion flares resulting from the disruption of giant stars should last for tens to hundreds of years. Their characteristic signature in transient searches would not be the t –5/3 decay typically associated with tidal disruption events, but a correlated rise over many orders of magnitude in brightness on timescales of months to years. We calculate the relative disruption rates of stars of varying evolutionary stages in typical galactic centers, then use our results to produce Monte Carlo realizations of the expected flaring event populations. We find that the demographics of tidal disruption flares are strongly dependent on both stellar and black hole mass, especially near the limiting SMBH mass scale of ~108 M ☉. At this black hole mass, we predict a sharp transition in the SMBH flaring diet beyond which all observable disruptions arise from evolved stars, accompanied by a dramatic cutoff in the overall tidal disruption flaring rate. Black holes less massive than this limiting mass scale will show observable flares from both main-sequence and evolved stars, with giants contributing up to 10% of the event rate. The relative fractions of stars disrupted at different evolutionary states can constrain the properties and distributions of stars in galactic nuclei other than our own.

THE FORMATION OF ECCENTRIC COMPACT BINARY INSPIRALS AND THE ROLE OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE EMISSION IN BINARY-SINGLE STELLAR ENCOUNTERS

The inspiral and merger of eccentric binaries leads to gravitational waveforms distinct from those generated by circularly merging binaries. Dynamical environments can assemble binaries with high eccentricity and peak frequencies within the {\it LIGO} band. In this paper, we study binary-single stellar scatterings occurring in dense stellar systems as a source of eccentrically-inspiraling binaries. Many interactions between compact binaries and single objects are characterized by chaotic resonances in which the binary-single system undergoes many exchanges before reaching a final state. During these chaotic resonances, a pair of objects has a non-negligible probability of experiencing a very close passage. Significant orbital energy and angular momentum are carried away from the system by gravitational wave (GW) radiation in these close passages and in some cases this implies an inspiral time shorter than the orbital period of the bound third body. We derive the cross section for such dynamical inspiral outcomes through analytical arguments and through numerical scattering experiments including GW losses. We show that the cross section for dynamical inspirals grows with increasing target binary semi-major axis,

ASYMMETRIC ACCRETION FLOWS WITHIN A COMMON ENVELOPE

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Optical Thermonuclear Transients From Tidal Compression of White Dwarfs as Tracers of the Low End of the Massive Black Hole Mass Function

, and that for equal-mass binaries it scales as

Compact Stellar Binary Assembly in the First Nuclear Star Clusters and r-process Synthesis in the Early Universe

a^{2/7}

THE CLOSE STELLAR COMPANIONS TO INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLES

. Thus, we expect wide target binaries to predominantly contribute to the production of these relativistic outcomes. We estimate that eccentric inspirals account for approximately one percent of dynamically assembled non-eccentric merging binaries. While these events are rare, we show that binary-single scatterings are a more effective formation channel than single-single captures for the production of eccentrically-inspiraling binaries, even given modest binary fractions.

ON THE ACCRETION-FED GROWTH OF NEUTRON STARS DURING COMMON ENVELOPE

This paper examines flows in the immediate vicinity of stars and compact objects dynamically inspiralling within a common envelope (CE). Flow in the vicinity of the embedded object is gravitationally focused leading to drag and potential to gas accretion. This process has been studied numerically and analytically in the context of Hoyle-Lyttleton accretion (HLA). Yet, within a CE, accretion structures may span a large fraction of the envelope radius, and in so doing sweep across a substantial radial gradient of density. We quantify these gradients using detailed stellar evolution models for a range of CE encounters. We provide estimates of typical scales in CE encounters that involve main sequence stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes with giant-branch companions of a wide range of masses. We apply these typical scales to hydrodynamic simulations of 3D HLA with an upstream density gradient. This density gradient breaks the symmetry that defines HLA flow, and imposes an angular momentum barrier to accretion. Material that is focused into the vicinity of the embedded object thus may not be able to accrete. As a result, accretion rates drop dramatically, by 1-2 orders of magnitude, while drag rates are only mildly affected. We provide fitting formulae to the numerically-derived rates of drag and accretion as a function of the density gradient. The reduced ratio of accretion to drag suggests that objects that can efficiently gain mass during CE evolution, such as black holes and neutron stars, may grow less than implied by the HLA formalism.

Runaway Coalescence at the Onset of Common Envelope Episodes

In this paper, we model the observable signatures of tidal disruptions of white dwarf (WD) stars by massive black holes (MBHs) of moderate mass,

Dissipative Evolution of Unequal Mass Binary-Single Interactions and its Relevance to Gravitational Wave Detections

\approx 10^3 - 10^5 M_\odot

POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF THE G2 CLOUD FROM THE TIDAL DISRUPTION OF A KNOWN GIANT STAR BY SGR A

. When the WD passes deep enough within the MBHs tidal field, these signatures include thermonuclear transients from burning during maximum compression. We combine a hydrodynamic simulation that includes nuclear burning of the disruption of a