Pre-peak Emission in Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract The rising part of a tidal disruption event light curve provides unique insight into early emission and the onset of accretion. Various mechanisms are proposed to explain the pre-peak emission, including shocks from debris interaction and reprocessing of disk emission. We study the pre-peak emission and its influence on the gas circularization by a series of gray radiation hydrodynamic simulations with varying black hole mass. We find that, given a super-Eddington fallback rate of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:msub> <mml:mrow> <mml:mover accent="true"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>̇</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:mover> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>Edd</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , the stream–stream collision can occur multiple times and drive strong outflows of up to <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mn>9</mml:mn> <mml:msub> <mml:mrow> <mml:mover accent="true"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>̇</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:mover> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>Edd</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> . By dispersing gas to ≳100 r s , the outflow can delay gas circularization and leads to sub-Eddington accretion rates during the first few stream–stream collisions. The stream–stream collision shock and circularization shock can sustain a luminosity of ∼10 44 erg s −1 for days. The luminosity is generally sub-Eddington and shows a weak correlation with accretion rate at early times. The outflow is optically thick, yielding a reprocessing layer with a size of ∼10 14 cm and photospheric temperature of ∼4 × 10 4 K.