Fast Optical Transients from Stellar-mass Black Hole Tidal Disruption Events in Young Star Clusters
Abstract
Observational evidence suggests that the majority of stars may have been born in stellar clusters or associations. Within these dense environments, dynamical interactions lead to high rates of close stellar encounters. A variety of recent observational and theoretical indications suggest stellar-mass black holes may be present and play an active dynamical role in stellar clusters of all masses. In this study, we explore the tidal disruption of main-sequence stars by stellar-mass black holes in young star clusters. We compute a suite of over 3000 independent N-body simulations that cover a range of cluster mass, metallicity, and half-mass radii. We find stellar-mass black hole tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur at an overall rate of up to roughly 200 Gpc⁻³ yr⁻¹ in young stellar clusters in the local universe. These TDEs are expected to have several characteristic features, namely, fast rise times of order a day, peak X-ray luminosities of at least 10⁴⁴ erg s⁻¹, and bright optical luminosities (roughly 10⁴¹–10⁴⁴ erg s⁻¹) associated with reprocessing by a disk wind. In particular, we show these events share many features in common with the emerging class of Fast Blue Optical Transients.
Additional Information
© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 December 3; revised 2021 February 19; accepted 2021 February 27; published 2021 April 22. We thank Tom Maccarone for helpful suggestions on the manuscript and Carl Rodriguez for useful preliminary discussions. We also thank the anonymous referee for the careful review and many helpful suggestions. K.K. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-2001751. W.L. is supported by the David and Ellen Lee Fellowship at Caltech. S.C. acknowledges support of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project no. 12-R&D-TFR-5.02-0200. F.A.R. and C.S.Y. acknowledge support from NSF grant AST-1716762 at Northwestern University.Attached Files
Published - Kremer_2021_ApJ_911_104.pdf
Submitted - 2012.02796.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 107402
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210111-160829075
- AST-2001751
- NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship
- David and Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Fellowship
- 12-R&D-TFR-5.02-0200
- Department of Atomic Energy (India)
- AST-1716762
- NSF
- Created
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2021-01-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-04-23Created from EPrint's last_modified field