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Wednesday 02 Dec 2015: Seminar: Variability in tidal disruption events
Dr Chris Nixon - University of Leicester
Physics, 4th floor 14:00-15:00
When a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) it can be destroyed by tides. The resulting stellar debris follows approximately Keplerian orbits, some of which are bound to the SMBH and return to vicinity of the hole, others are unbound and escape. I will present recent smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of this process. These simulations reveal the effects of self-gravity on the stream structure, which impacts the rate of return of material to pericentre and therefore the inferred luminosity of tidal disruption events.
