Full Description
This book provides a general introduction to the rapidly developing astrophysical frontier of stellar tidal disruption, but also details original thesis research on the subject. This work has shown that recoiling black holes can disrupt stars far outside a galactic nucleus, errors in the traditional literature have strongly overestimated the maximum luminosity of "deeply plunging" tidal disruptions, the precession of transient accretion disks can encode the spins of supermassive black holes, and much more. This work is based on but differs from the original thesis that was formally defended at Harvard, which received both the Roger Doxsey Award and the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award from the American Astronomical Society.
Contents
Introduction.- Tidal Disruption Rates from Two-Body Relaxation.- Prompt Tidal Disruption of Stars as an Electromagnetic Signature of Supermassive Black Hole Coalescence.- Tidal Disruption Flares of Stars From Moderately Recoiled Black Holes.- Consequences of Strong Compression in Tidal Disruption Events.- General Relativistic Effects in Tidal Disruption Flares.- Observing Lense-Thirring Precession in Tidal Disruption Flares.- Conclusions and Future Directions.- References.- Appendices.
