When a star drifts too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart in a giant flare called a tidal disruption event, also known as a TDE. University of Utah physics students Coleman Rohde and Gavin Farley have spent the past year teaming up to figure out how powerful these events actually are.
Rohde, a senior double majoring in physics and math, has been improving how scientists estimate the energy released during these flares. Researchers usually use a general method to get a minimum amount of the energy, but some parts had only been looked at separately. Rohde found a way to bring those pieces together into a more concise and clean calculation. He also built an open-source code so other scientists can input their own data and use the updated method. Rohde explained, “I was able to derive corrections which considered all of these extensions to equipartition analysis simultaneously. I then developed an open-source code for this equipartition calculation in hopes that scientists anywhere working on the energy estimation of transients can download my code from GitHub and use it.”
Farley, who studies physics with a focus on astronomy and astrophysics, focused on a specific TDE called AT 2022wtn that occurred more than 700 million light years away.
Using radio observations from the Very Large Array and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, along with Rohde’s code, Farley was able to analyze the outflow produced by AT 2022wtn. Their team was able to estimate various physical properties of the expanding shock wave by modeling the radio emission and applying Rohde’s updated equipartition analysis. The results showed them that the event had produced an unusually powerful outflow compared with many other non-relativistic TDEs, which suggests that some black hole flares may release more energy than earlier estimates had indicated.
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