Interaction of an outflow with surrounding gaseous clouds as the origin of the late-time radio flares in TDEs

• Published in: arXiv.org 2024-12
• Main Authors: Zhuang, Jialun, Rong-Feng, Shen, Mou, Guobin, Lu, Wenbin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Disruption; Outflow; Spectral signatures; Stellar flares; Supermassive black holes
• ISSN: 2331-8422

Close encounter between a star and a supermassive black hole (SMBH) results in the tidal disruption of the star, known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Recently, a few TDEs, e.g., ASASSN-15oi and AT2018hyz, have shown late-time (hundreds of days after their UV/optical peaks) radio flares with radio luminosities of \(10^{38\sim39}\) erg/s. The super-Eddington fallback or accretion in a TDE may generate a mass outflow. Here we investigate a scenario that the late-time radio flares come from the interaction of the outflow with the circum-nuclear gaseous clouds, in addition to the slow-evolving emission component due to the outflow-diffuse medium interaction. We calculate the associated radio temporal and spectral signatures and find that they reproduce well the observations. The outflows have the inferred velocity of 0.2$c\sim0.6$$c\(, the total mass of \)10^{-3}\sim10^{-1}\( \)\mathrm{M_{\odot}}\( and the ejection duration of a month to a year. The distances of the clouds to the SMBH are \)0.1\sim1$ pc. This scenario has advantages in explaining the long delay, sharpness of the rise and the multiplicity of the late radio flares. Future observations may build up a much larger sample of late-time radio flares and enable their use as a probe of the TDE physics and the host circumnuclear environment.